He tries to gauge from oblique comments what happened in the missing parts of his life. Given that the neurotic hero doesn’t want to divulge his difficulty, his life becomes excruciating and puzzling.
He doesn’t remember the interval between. He rings the bell to Lael’s house-blank-Lael and him are lolling in the grass in a park, miles away. In an innovative and chilling narrative turn, Rudd begins to experience mental blanks. He begins obsessing over it to the point of contemplating, for religious purposes mind you, some ritual slaughters of his own. (The novel supplies newspaper accounts.) Rudd, raised by his mother after his father’s suicide, is was already troubled and have begun associating with his hoodlum half brother, Lael, when he finds out about this slaying. Rudd decides to write his English term paper on a slaying that was committed in turn-of-the-century New York City by William Hooper, the grandson of Brigham Young-a crime some claim enacted a Mormon blood sacrifice. Is it by chance that the novel has the same direction? It describes the youth, Rudd, mentally fiddling with Mormon rituals, though in this case fiddling leads to murder, insanity and time warps. Still, he does say this was only one factor in the change, so let’s take his statement at face value and interpret him as saying that, to a degree, Mormonism is a system of verbally expressible practices that can be dislodged from a believer’s consciousness by being intelligently fiddled with. Evenson states, “The book itself was an integral part of a movement from a position of faith to a position of unbelief.” On the surface this seems implausible in that one imagines a major redirection in life would depend on a net of events in one’s daily life: new friends, new contacts, new situations, not on playing with words.
Brian Evenson’s The Open Curtain circles around two murky, frightening mysteries: the first contained in the novel proper, which tells the story of a contemporary high-school-age Mormon boy who becomes fascinated with a nineteenth-century murder, the second in the book’s afterword, where the author purports to explain why he wrote the book.
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