Small Town Dysfunction: Michael J. Sahno’s Brothers’ Hand

At twenty-eight, Jerome Brothers lives an aimless life drifting without purpose between a dead-end job and raucous parties hosted by local high school students in their parents’ basements, in a dull, confused attempt at feeling something - anything. All that changes when, in an acid-soaked daze, he falls out of a tree, lands on a train track, and loses his right hand.

There’s a certain farcical element to Michael Sahno’s first novel, a note of black humor that rescues what would otherwise be an unspeakably bleak tale. It follows both Jerome and the people in his orbit: his physical therapist, Maria, whose lapses of professionalism seriously complicate her relationship with Jerome; Johnny Caruso, the high-school student who laced Jerome’s drink on the night of his fateful fall; his mother, Louise; and a handful of other denizens of the fictional upstate New York town of Carverville. And while Sahno explores the question of human connection and the possibility of repairing broken relationships, he does not always reach a satisfying conclusion.

Among the Carverville natives, there are Tom and Phyllis Atkins, the proprietors of Macy’s Mart, a charmingly old-fashioned local shop that “…still retain[s] the flavor of an era nearly forgotten.” Their young son is dying of leukemia, and Tom and Phyllis endure this in stoic, blandly pleasant silence, inquiring after the daily minutiae of their customers and declining to talk - even to one another - about the horrors of chemotherapy and their child’s slow decline. In a conversation with Jerome about the latter’s missing hand, Tom notes that “…it felt almost right, as if by putting the focus on someone else’s misfortune for the moment, his own would be somehow a little easier to bear.”

Parental grief is an ongoing theme of the novel. In addition to the unfortunate Atkinses, there is Bill McCullough, whose young son was killed in a gun accident sixteen years ago and whose lingering guilt is still so overwhelming that he can’t even bring himself to tell his new wife that the boy existed, let alone died, or how. For a different sort of grief, there is Louise Caruso, who finds herself watching helplessly as her teenaged son’s drug addiction and anger issues begin to spiral violently out of control, culminating in a vicious attack on a female classmate.

Sahno is at his best when he’s exploring the complicated dynamics of grief and forgiveness; in addition to the bereft parents, there are Ed and Margaret Robbins, whose marriage is slowly disintegrating. Ed is an unemployed alcoholic, and Margaret’s stoic acceptance of his fecklessness has curdled over time into dull resentment. In such a small, traditional town, divorce is not the “done thing,” and she grapples for a long time with the prospect of escaping her unhappy marriage only to face the opprobrium of her neighbors. Jerome Brothers is also grappling with a different sort of grief; though he pretends outwardly to be unbothered by the loss of his hand, even going so far as to refuse therapy and prosthetics, he has difficulty accepting the limitations it places on his life. It’s in the smallest details that this is the most painfully apparent - brushing his teeth, for example, has become an onerous chore.

For a time, Maria Santisia plays the part of his kindly therapist, but she is a woman with her own demons and her relationship with Jerome quickly oversteps the bounds of professionalism, to disastrous ends. This is perhaps the one sour note in an otherwise well-executed novel. The relationship between the two of them is clearly meant to be a matter of spontaneous attraction and intellectual connection, but a great deal of the banter is unconvincing - even cringe-inducing - and it’s difficult to see the appeal in Jerome’s rude and overbearing approach to flirtation. Ironically, Sahno handles the aftermath of their inevitable breakup better than the romance itself; Maria develops much more convincingly as a character without having to play the part of the winsome love interest, and their eventual, tentative reconciliation is more convincing than the initial romance. The weird intimacy of small-town relationships is very well done, though, and while the final scene could certainly not be described as happy, there is an inevitability to the denouement that makes it very satisfying. A promising first novel.

Michael J. Sahno obtained a Master of Arts in English from Binghamton University, going on to become a full-time professional writer in 2001. Brothers’ Hand is his first novel.