Placeholders by James Roseman: Crossing the cultural divide

Cover image for Placeholders by James RosemanJames Roseman’s Placeholders is the fourth novel I’ve read published by Verve Books, a comparatively new imprint, all of them good if not excellent. If you’re interested the others are Sunburn, How Can I Help You and Blue Hour, my favourite and an unfulfilled wish on my Booker Prize list. Roseman’s novel follows Aaron and Róisín, both lost in different ways, who fall into a relationship which may turn to love.

For the first time in a long time, Aaron feels that he is exactly where he is supposed to be.

Aaron’s life was interrupted five years ago when his brother was killed in Israel, a volunteer for the IDF. Since then, he’s cut himself off from his parents, blaming them for supporting Moe in his decision, thrown out of college and working in a dead-end job while partying hard with his roommate, Jake. On one of those nights, Aaron meets Róisín who’s overstayed her visa, escaping a controlling relationship back home in Ireland, homesick for her family but knowing that to go home means never returning to Boston. A tentative relationship begins, each careful with the other, until Aaron turns up after a bender with Jake and Róisín calls a temporary halt which threatens to become permanent until she finds she’s pregnant. When Jake proposes a radical solution, Róisín is hesitant. There’s a possibility of love and a good life together but can two people from such very different backgrounds bridge the chasm between them?

He wraps her in a hug and kisses her cheek. Róisín feels a tightness between her shoulder blades release like a rock that’s been fished out of a shoe after a long day, a constant irritation noticed only by the relief of its absence.

Roseman’s novel delicately explores themes of religious and cultural identity, grief, homesickness and loneliness with empathy and compassion, smoothly shifting between Aaron and Róisín’s perspectives. Theirs is far from an original story but it’s the quality of Roseman’s writing that lifts this novel. Each of them is torn between the life they could have together and their roots in very different cultures, complicated by Róisín’s status as an illegal alien. Roseman’s characters are well drawn: Aaron’s poleaxing by his brother’s death evokes sympathy even while his arrested development irritates; the pain of Róisín’s overwhelming homesickness is sharply conveyed while Jake and his sidekick Percy’s inability to register Aaron’s despair is all too believable. A quietly enjoyable novel which left me with much to think about and keen to read what Roseman comes up with next.

Verve Books Harpenden 9780857308573 256 pages Paperback (read via NetGalley

14 thoughts on “Placeholders by James Roseman: Crossing the cultural divide”

  1. I have seen this reviewed on American book blogs, getting good reviews. Maybe a tamer Rooney type of book! Sounds like a sensitive portrayal of effects of trauma on relationships.

  2. The one example of writing, while reasonably original, smacks slightly of being overwritten. This book has the makings of a novel I’d like to read while being unlikely to pursue the angles I’d find most interesting. His brother was with the IDF, she’s Irish, they’re in America, these elements, combined well, could make for a hugely important story. Somehow I doubt that’s the one Roseman will have written.

      1. I know I should appreciate that. I’m trying to do so.
        I remember a review from years ago written by Bernardine Evaristo in The Guardian on The Prisoner of Paradise by Romesh Gunesekera. I had read the novel myself. Romesh is a lovely man and a great writer. Her criticism had to do with the fact that he had set it on Mauritius, but largely, in her view, side-stepped the history of slavery there in order to write a sort of historical romance.
        It’s a tricky thing, saying what another writer should be writing about, or what they aren’t allowed to avoid! Maybe small canvases are one way forward. In any case, it was interesting to note someone else’s comment to this post involving the suggestion of Roseman’s approach having a parallel with that of Sally Rooney. Rooney spends a lot of time speaking out about the narrative around Palestine. Given limited time in this world , I’ll put Isabella Hammad’s nonfiction Recognizing the Stranger near the front of my own queue. For fiction, I have pre-ordered the paperback of The Caretaker. American Congressional representatives have holding forth about Israel’s rights while demonstrating a more limited interest in a community in their own country who have been hit with a hurricane in the region Rash has spent a career writing about. Then again, mostly the South, the poor, etc… Quite a setting, America. If I’d never left it I’d know so much less about it. Thank heavens for the freedom we have to read anything and everything that helps us toward growth in our understandings, and ideally, compassion. Love, Jenny

        1. Thanks heavens, indeed, and that we have the luxury to express what we think. For me, small canvases can add something, Sheila Kennedy’s Trespasses for instance, but I take your point. Adding the Hammand to my own list. xx

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