Jesse Ball’s new novel The Curfew plays with old expectations

Jesse Ball wrote his new novel, The Curfew (Vintage, $14.95), in 2008, and it hits shelves this week and is available as an e-book. And yet, like his past work (Samedi the Deafness, The Way Through Doors), there’s something about The Curfew that feels antique, like a relic picked up and dusted off at an antiquarian bookstore.

“I like to say [my writing is] old-fashioned because some people don’t like it,” says Ball, 32, laughing. “It’s less old-fashioned than it is a culling out of language that corporations and businesses and public relations [use]. Like ‘refreshing.’ You can’t use ‘refreshing’ anymore.”

Aside from his diction, Ball also employs a directness and simplicity at odds with much of contemporary literature, and blankets much of the story in grand metaphor. In The Curfew, William Drysdale and his daughter Molly live in a city solemnly quieted by an oppressive regime. Music has been banned, so former violinist William takes a job as an epitaphologist, writing the words on the townspeople’s tombstones. His wife, Louisa, has been disappeared by the government, and with secret police nowhere and everywhere at once, the threat persists. William makes contact with a dissident friend, and after attending a brief meeting, has to traverse the city during the imposed curfew.

Seemingly a parable made all the more ominous by Ball’s narrative asides (“He did not hurry out of worry that he would be late, but because it was the appearance of virtuous citizens—hurrying.”), the book takes a sharp turn in the second half. With William’s story ending on the walk home, the rest of the book concerns Molly, staying at the house of her neighbor, Mr. Gibbons. She and Mr. Gibbons put on a puppet show, telling the story of William and Louisa before Molly (or, at least how Molly understands or imagines it), and taking the reader past the timeline of the book’s first half.

Ball, an assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, says part of the reason for switching from William’s story to the puppet show was to tell the back story in a more natural way, rather than in flashback in the middle of the action. But it also allows Ball to add layers of complication to the previous material, and, as he says, create literature that is “simultaneously an actual thing and a metaphor about that thing.”

“Sometimes a plot can go on like a railroad train, and everything is always changing. But in this book, the atmosphere is very delicate and carefully wrought. So, returning to the events with her perspective and reinterpreting them as a puppet show allows the atmosphere to be very still.”

Ball may not be the best-known or the best-selling author in Chicago, but I’d maintain that he is the city’s most audacious. Few authors have the guts or the skill to pull off a book like this, where the main story is given up in favor of a puppet show halfway through. The Curfew reads like the most overtly political of his novels so far. The “ministry” of The Way Through Doors was shadowy and implicitly nefarious, but the government in the new novel is actively oppressing and killing its citizens. But Ball says he is not a political person, though he understands that the book could be read as allegory.

“I don’t have any hope that the world will get any better than it is right now, politically or socially,” he says. “I don’t think it goes between better and worse states, it just is and you live your life within it. If I had a political platform, it would be the primacy of the imagination.”

The Curfew is out now.