The Origin of Species.

Stripped to its bare bones, this novel chronicles one year in the life of Alex Fratarcangeli, a thirtysomething graduate student beginning to draft his PhD thesis in English literature for Concordia in 1986.

But the novel is anything but stripped to its bare bones. Alex’s life is complicated in the extreme both by contemporaneous events and by myriad previous experiences. In the present of the novel he is struggling with a Polish émigré thesis advisor, Jiri, his lust for a number of women, and his guilt over relationships recently ended. His apartment building is falling to speculators, he is struggling with part-time teaching that involves him with El Salvadorian refugees and a right-wing French-Canadian executive. He has an unsatisfactory Freudian analyst, a laden relationship with his Italian family, and the current events of the day, including the Chernobyl disaster, constantly weigh upon him.

Alex is also burdened with several formative experiences. Chief among these is a catastrophic odyssey to the Galapagos Islands during which he gets involved with a nearly insane biologist, Desmond, who drowned in a storm. He also discovers that a relationship he had with Ingrid in Sweden as a younger student produced a son, Per, and he struggles to decide whether to go to Sweden to be a father or to continue his thesis.

In the tattered remains of postmodern literary theory, Alex is trying to tie the developments of kinds of literature to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. His knowledge of Darwin’s life and work is used to throw a spotlight on the experiences of Alex’s life and the lives of others in the book. He also has imaginary conversations with Peter Gzowski.

A novel develops slowly, driven not by a strong plot line but by the way facets of Alex’s character are revealed. Just as Darwin’s Origin builds so slowly on a wealth of vital detail, so Ricci finally arrives at an overwhelming portrait of an uncertain man’s struggle with himself and his times.