Lost in Perdition
A moving novel about compassion and redemption, Lost in Perdition places a serendipitous friendship at its core.
In Shana Mavournin’s resonant novel Lost in Perdition, an unhoused man seeks redemption and reconnection through friendship.
In a Nebraska park, fifty-one-year-old Jack reflects upon his troubled life. Born into wealth, he was doted upon—handsome, intelligent, and well-liked. Though he began recreational drug use in his teenage years, he balanced partying with studying and earned high marks. After college, he married Claire and took a teaching job. But following the anguish of a miscarriage, Jack’s substance abuse increased; he had an affair, and Claire filed for divorce.
After completing a rehabilitation program, Jack’s access to his trust fund became contingent upon his remaining sober. Hoping to atone, he began making sizable anonymous donations to various charities and institutions. He also chose to remain unhoused as personal penance and to keep himself from relapsing into addictive behaviors. Years later, after being given food by Kate and her son, Jacky, Jack develops a friendship with the two before learning that he and Kate share a bond. Meanwhile, Jacky is diagnosed with leukemia.
Jack’s characterization is complex. In flashbacks, he moves from youthful charm and the benefits of his easygoing charisma to feeling ill-prepared for challenges. His marital strife tests him, and he regards Claire’s objections to his drug use as annoying self-righteousness. His other addiction-related memories are regretful and perceptive; he recalls a girl’s descent into heroin dependence and prostitution, her “empty eyes” staring at him from beneath a “sallow streetlight.” But Jack’s own heroin use is treated in a cursory manner; he notes that he only “ventured into” it once and “woke up in a dumpster behind a frat house.” And while the book builds up Jack’s charitable efforts to reveal his strong moral core, the reasons behind his prolonged exile, which includes enduring brutal Nebraska winters and compromising his general safety and dignity, seem more internalized and evasive.
A single mother and nursing student, Kate regards Jack with pragmatic compassion. Her four-year-old son Jacky is exuberant and generous; upon first seeing Jack at a local McDonald’s, Jacky insists that his mother buy Jack a children’s Happy Meal. Jack’s relationship with Kate and Jacky moves at a measured and convincing pace as the three become closer through their weekly meetings. The later revelation of serendipitous elements intensifies their connection while heightening the book’s poignant undercurrent.
With its entwined themes of family estrangements, homelessness, redemptive desires, substance abuse, and childhood cancer, the book’s progression and conclusion rely on its prolonged emotional dramas. At times, however, the flow of anguished or karmic events seems somewhat forced and undermines the developing breadth of the book’s various characters. Occasional spelling errors prove distracting, too. But engaging details anchor the prose, as of the saltines and applesauce that Jacky eats to help ease his chemotherapy nausea. Elsewhere, Jack enjoys watching the rush of arrivals and departures at the train station, sipping coffee as he sits on a “creaky, paint-chipped” bench.
A man emerges from addiction and self-imposed purgatory in the heartening novel Lost in Perdition.
Reviewed by
Meg Nola
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