The Edgewood Troupe

Thomas Inman
Outskirts Press (2010)
ISBN 9781432747268
Reviewed by Olivera Baumgartner-Jackson for Reader Views (11/10) 

 

“The Edgewood Troupe” by Thomas Inman is undoubtedly an ambitious book, clocking in at 500+ pages. The synopsis on the back of it starts thus: “San Francisco’s Edgewood Avenue dead-ends at the brink of an expansive forest. Within that forest, on an isolated hill, sits a NIKE surface-to-air missile battery, with radar trailers, launch hoists, and V-2 derivative missiles. Together, unsuspected by Edgewoodians, were the principal, percipient makings for, proverbially, The Fall. Radioactive agents, a dubious panoply of toxic wastes, from Hunter's Point, Alameda Naval Air, and other sites were interred at the cockcrow of the blooming Nuclear Age.” The very beginning of this description makes one thing extraordinarily clear – the author is somebody with vast knowledge and vivid imagination and he is also not afraid of big words. I found that approach rather refreshing, so I was quite eager to plunge in.

After the first few chapters, which, just like most of the rest of the book, were short and tense, I found myself so confused that I decided to start reading from page one again. And then again. The harder I tried, the more confused I was becoming. The story that kept jumping from relative present to rather distant past (and eventually to the future…), the vast number of characters and locales, the intertwining stories, some of them rather loosely connected to the main idea, and the sheer amount of ideas and detail left me feeling totally overwhelmed. There were some truly brilliant moments (“Livingston, I presume.”), but also some moments where I was left shaking my head in total disbelief, including a couple of rather amusing typos. My favorite among those was the “rouge agent,” which I still believe was probably a rogue one, and not a French red one.  When you add a fair amount of un-translated words and sentences in several foreign languages, I do believe that most readers will feel as confused as I had, in spite of my ability to actually read and understand most of those segments.

I am not sure if it was the overly-fragmented storyline or simply the subject matter, but I simply could not get into the story of “The Edgewood Troupe” and make any real sense of it. Sometimes less is more.

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