The novel ABC by David Plante explores the fringes of obsession and of reaction to outside forces that cannot be explained. In one of the most emotional openings to any book I have read during this past year we are introduced to Gerard and Peggy and their six-year old boy Harry. The novel opens as they are on a canoe trip in a back-to-nature area in New Hampshire.
They stumble upon an abandoned house and young Harry talks his Dad into exploring it with him while their disapproving Mom waits for them to come back. It is not a spoiler to reveal what even the dust jacket flap copy details that Harry dies in the house in a freak accident before the heartstruck, unbelieving and perhaps-driven-mad eyes of his father, Gerard.
At the scene of this terrible accident, Gerard 
finds a scrap of paper covered with the letters of an unknown-to-him alphabet. Unthinkingly he pockets the paper and then himself is injured at the scene.
finds a scrap of paper covered with the letters of an unknown-to-him alphabet. Unthinkingly he pockets the paper and then himself is injured at the scene. Later, at home, recuperating from his injuries although hardly being able to recuperate at all from his loss he and his wife try to cope, each in their own way. His wife, as grief-stricken as him, tries to face the problem but Gerard refuses to talk about it, to talk about Harry or to try to understand Harry's death in any way reminiscent of the usual steps.
When Peggy approaches Gerard about what to do with Harry's blood-stained shorts the first glimpses of the deep ravines in Harry's ravaged mind become visible.
"It was the sheet of paper I really wanted," he said, "you can do what you want with the shorts."
"And that has more significance to you than anything else?"
"I don't know why."
"You mean, it does?"
"He could only answer, "I don't know why."
And so when he finds in a used bookstore a copy of Historie de L'Ecriture he has already decided that the tiny sheet of gibberish-covered paper must in some way have some sort of meaning to him about Harry's death. And so the book which details the historic questions as to why the alphabet is how it is begins to fascinate him - especially when he finds that the strange characters on the paper are Sanskrit letters, root-ancestral to our own ABCs.
At this point the obsession begins to control him. While he never equates it totally in his mind with Harry's death the reader is left without a doubt that the root of Harry's obsessive interests is that if he can somehow discover how one inexplicable event can be explicated, perhaps other inexplicables can be so investigated and explained.
But Harry's investigations are as flawed by his obsession with the questions posed by the paper as his marriage. Indeed, Harry turns into perhaps one of the world's worst husbands as he abandons his wife for far-flung travels based on his manic fixation on the paper and the question of why the alphabet is as it is.
The very first investigation he goes on leads him to the actual
answer that most people would have simply accepted and tried to move on from afterwards. He finds that local teenagers were using the house as a clubhouse. It was they who weakened the floorboards as a stupid, childish prank without forethought as to the possible ramifications.
answer that most people would have simply accepted and tried to move on from afterwards. He finds that local teenagers were using the house as a clubhouse. It was they who weakened the floorboards as a stupid, childish prank without forethought as to the possible ramifications.But, no, the paper, the alphabet - somehow he is sure that this has an answer that will be more revealing, more cosmic, more of a zeit-geist type of answer and less of a mundane, shoulder-shrug of an answer. And so he sets out on travels that will take him almost around the world in the company of a few others who for similar reasons seem to be seeking the same alphabetic explanations.
With these other broken people, those who have lost loved ones or who have had their lives crumble around them, he begins this alpha and omega investigation into the world of ABC. Does the alphabet contain some sort of coded messages which, when decoded, may well reveal the face of the Universe perhaps the very workings of either the Mind of God or the dice-rolling rules under it all? Is the alphabet actually the true form of the shadows on Plato's wall?
After all, why does B come after A. Why does the AB mini-sequence precede the C? Why does the alphabet end with Z? The actual structure of the alphabet seems to be as if some sort of meta-message was being handed down, from one Age to the next, from one Culture to the next.
Gerard and his alphabet-hunting friends explore all sorts of avenues from the deeply academic to the deeply esoteric, from the philosophical to the historical, they delve into semiotics and swim in pre-History and yet it becomes clearer and clearer that the answer, should there be one, is elusive and perhaps lost.
When they finally do reach an understanding so many events have spiraled in each of their lives that they have not only lost their direction but even wanting a map means that they have lost the territory. The book's ending, for me, was somewhat disappointing but on second reading I came to the conclusion that to be true to the characters and the underlying questions that the author, as opposed to the characters, was really asking, well, the ending was well enough.
I do know that when you have read ABC you will never again look at a file cabinet in the same way. Nor will you approach philosophical thought in quite the same way again. The novel is effective and affective. Author Plante can say that now he knows his ABCs and be unafraid to ask if we are proud.
ABC, a novel by David Plant is published by Pantheon Books in hardcover and retails for $23.00
