“The voice of this boy simply began to speak in my head, telling me a story that at some point became mine. I could do nothing but put it down in writing.” With this simplicity Louis C.K. describes his first novel, Ingram, published in Italy by Corbaccio and translated by Alessandro Mola.
A story written by a famous comedian who, however, has little of the humorous in it and within which there is much suffering, without ever slipping into rhetoric. Louis C.K. has found a very thin thread and managed to make it resonate throughout the tale: that of a melancholy and passionate tenderness with which to speak of failure, of abandonment, of the pain endured and inflicted by those who live on the margins of life and of the world.
Ingram
“I cannot tell you how to survive or even how to live, Ingram”
Ingram is nine years old and lives somewhere on a Texas farm when he is forced to leave home, because soon it will be foreclosed by a bank. Ingram does not know why, he does not know where to go, indeed, he knows almost nothing beyond the small desolate and dull world in which he is spending a solitary childhood, watching the physical and inner decay of his mother and enduring the brutality of his father. “I cannot tell you how to survive or even how to live, Ingram. All I can tell you is to keep going as long as you can, in any way possible,” are the last words he hears from his mother, before venturing into a territory that is completely alien to him.
Thus begins this coming-of-age novel told entirely through the wondrous and innocent voice of a child forced to wander through the deepest and most devastated America, a kind of erased non-place punctuated by zones of suffering, misery, exploitation, and death. Ingram’s path leads nowhere, yet he travels it with a childish and stirring stubbornness, forced to learn on his skin every unpleasant novelty of the world of outcasts into which he has fallen.
Paragonato a Mark Twain
Louis C.K. has been compared to Mark Twain and he himself has spoken of Huckleberry as one of his references. Certainly Ingram is a black fable suspended in a time that could be either the past of the Great Depression or our own darkest present. Ingram will encounter the harsher and dehumanizing jobs, hunger, racial tensions and death, stopping in cornfields, oil wells, and ghetto neighborhoods, meeting a multitude of defeated and forgotten characters: each of them will leave him something and provide him with a new lesson before abandoning him to his fate, and each time the harshness of reality is filtered through his innocent gaze and a strange blend of fatalism and tenacity that will enable this child-to-man to survive in the hell of marginalization.
No American Dream
There is no American dream in Ingram, no concession to the myth of redemption and the land of opportunity. Indeed, everyone who crosses Ingram’s path seems fully aware of being without hope: they are spectral figures, devoted only to the practice of survival. There is no trust, then, in any horizon of otherworldly salvation (“On Sundays a woman named Gloria, the wife of the one who paid us, would arrive by car with a man named Preacher. We would gather in a tent, sit on chairs, and he would talk to us about Jesus. (…) The boss said we had to listen, so I sat there with my head turned toward him and my eyes open, but I didn’t hear a single word I could repeat, except ‘Jesus,’ and I wondered why everyone always spoke of Jesus as if he were there, when he wasn’t there.”). There is instead a large and strong closeness and pity for all those who have lost or who have lost themselves, even for the vilest: each of them still has something somewhere inside them, or at least once had it. Something that, in some form, also dwells in Ingram and never abandons him, even as he grows and becomes a man.
The story of a growth that does not bring with it easy redemption
This novel is the story of a coming-of-age that does not carry with it easy redemption. Ingram will not experience victory: at some point he will simply have become grown. But becoming an adult does not mean the end of his journey, on the contrary. He will have to go back, to reweave the threads of his abandonment, and thus manage to discover a secret he himself did not even know he had, something buried deep within his core that will force him to start again, but this time not blindly and toward a world he does not know, but with a clear goal, which has to do with love that — despite everything — he managed to learn from those he met.
To his first foray as a writer Louis C.K. managed to craft a coming-of-age novel that is tender without being cloying, deeply sad without being despairing. Louis C.K. has said that “what I hope the reader takes away from Ingram is a way of looking at life without taking anything for granted (…) he is innocent, his mind is a kind of blank sheet that fills with impressions.” Through the eyes of Ingram’s innocence we see the underside of contemporary society, and we can try to look at pain in another way.
