There are certain memories we recall when trying to make sense of the person we’ve become: the breakup we never got over, scenes from childhood, the trip that changed our worldview.
Nino Ricci’s “The Origin of Species’’ is an achingly honest look at how our life choices get stacked up to form the picture of who we are whether we like it or not. Ricci’s dry, sardonic prose is sharp, with the cadence of natural thought that tumbles forward without getting lost.
The novel, whose title is an obvious allusion to the masterwork of Charles Darwin, looks at the evolution of Alex Fratarcangeli, a 30-something doctoral candidate in Montreal struggling to pull himself together and finish his dissertation despite a lifetime of regrets and failures.
When we meet Alex it’s apparent that he doesn’t much like the person he’s become, an insight he fights with but can’t quite acknowledge. Even during his therapy sessions with Dr. Klein, whom he started seeing following a breakup, Alex avoids the subjects most burdening him, lying just to get through the hour.
The main action of the book takes place over the course of a year, from 1986 to 1987, in Montreal. The time is post-Chernobyl and in the midst of the HIV/AIDS panic. The mood is vaguely apocalyptic.
The chapters are rife with flashbacks to the years previous: a failed relationship, a life-altering trip to the Galapagos in 1980, and backpacking through Europe in his early 20s.
One such flashback is the unraveling of his torturous, long-term, on-again, off-again relationship with Liz. Alex chews over the guilt he experienced after Liz became pregnant and she decided to get an abortion — something he didn’t try to talk her out of because it’s what he wanted anyway, though he cloaked his feelings in a shroud of ambiguity. And then there is the remorse he feels over the way he forced himself on Liz in a way that can only be described as rape amid the final throes of their relationship. These memories gnaw at him, but at the same time he can’t seem to bring himself to acknowledge the truth of his personal responsibility, pushing it to the recesses of his mind to let it fester.
As a foil to his destructive relationship with Liz is the one he has with Ingrid, a woman Alex met while traveling through Sweden years before. Ingrid is a single mother living a quiet, suburban life with her two children. And despite an age gap of almost a decade, the two possess a kind of magnetic pull on each other, which draws Alex back for subsequent visits over the years.