Description:
In Steven Galloway's Ascension the story of Salvo Usari, a Romany tightrope walker, begins where it ends: almost 1,400 feet about the streets of New York City in a fictional 1976 performance on a wire suspended between the World Trade Center towers. From this first moment, Galloway establishes a careful balance between a thrilling adventure story enriched by circus lore and ca haracter-driven tale reflecting Salvo's complex life and remarkable immigrant history. Leaving New York, Galloway shifts to Savlo's youth in Transylvania, circa 1919. Salvo's father, Miksa, has taught his nine-year-old son the essential myths that form the Rom, or gypsy, identity, but the legends cannot prepare the boy for an abrupt tragedy, an accident at a gadje church, that leads to the murder of his father and mother and to Salvo's long separation from his brother and baby sister. Salvo climbs to the pinnacle of the mammoth church steeple, tears out his soul--flinging it towards God--and begins a wandering life. Galloway then traces the paths of the Usari siblings over the years until they are rejoined at work as a family of tightrope walkers, eventually achieving acclaim in the Fisher-Fielding circus in the United States. But even reunited the Usaris cannot escape tragedy and further death. In the end, Salvo must return to the wire alone to pacify his unquiet mind. Galloway's execution of story and character is nearly flawless throughout, and his narrative, like Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, captures the essence of the 20th-century immigrant odyssey. But it is the blending of Romany folk tales and well-researched circus craft with this otherwise powerful narrative that defines Ascension and makes its unique contribution to literary art. --Patrick O'Kelley
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