“Timely” is generally considered a good thing when you see it in book reviews. It means “relevant” and also “insightful”; we are saying that the author has written something important that matters right now. In the case of Jakob Guanzon’s book Abundance, though, it makes me a bit sad that it was timely when it came out last year and is even more timely now. I’d like to think this sharply observed and deftly constructed novel about a father and son who descend into homelessness could become less timely, not more so. But here we are.
Abundance is often described as “wrenching,” and it is, but it’s also a relatable and moving portrait of the love between a father and his son, and an object lesson in the safety that most of us take for granted. One of the book’s strengths is the way it shows everyday objects as they look under extreme financial precarity. For example, in our first look at Henry’s F-250, it is shown to us as Henry and Junior’s home:
Bolted flush under the rear window is a lockable, diamond-plated utility case holding the few valuables that hadn’t been set outside on the front lawn during a last-minute, mid-December yard sale…A narrow bench seat is littered with Junior’s bedding, toys, school books, a plastic gallon jug for water, and Mom’s bese saka-printed shawl. Lying tipped on its side is the heating crown, a metal, nest-shaped contraption Henry made by crimping and molding a wire clothes hanger to support the dashboard cigarette burner under a can of food.
What it’s like for Henry and Junior to be living in their F-250 drives the narrative forward while flashbacks fill in the back story of Henry and his own father, as well as Henry and Michelle—Junior’s mother.
In the main plotline, it is Junior’s birthday and Henry has a job interview, so he has splurged on a $40 motel room as a treat for his son, and so he can clean up his interview suit and get a night’s sleep. But it’s too little, too late. Henry doesn’t have enough money to cushion himself or his son against the big and little twists of fate that threaten their safety. They need hot water to bathe, but the cheap motel requires a credit card for a hot water deposit. They need food, but Henry also needs a tank of gas to get to his interview, and there’s not enough money for both. Junior is peevish and unhappy and then spikes a fever. Henry finds enough coins to provide the Happy Meal that Junior wants, only to watch in dismay over his own empty stomach as the child picks at the food and then throws it in the trash. When Henry tries to get ibuprofen for Junior at a doctor’s office, his anxiety about his son is mistaken as threatening.
The flashbacks that are threaded through the main narrative keep the novel from being too grueling. We are share in the joy of the start of Henry’s relationship with Michelle and ride shotgun on a couple of hilariously hare-brained money-making schemes. When Henry’s parents die of cancer within months of each other, leaving their medical debts as a burden for their son, the blow is cushioned by the delight Henry feels at the birth of Junior. And it’s the same fatherly delight in his kid that knits the book together. Even as the world closes in, he is relentlessly, methodically laser-focused on doing whatever he has to do to care for him. It’s a book about love, not poverty.
I can barely aspire to the miracle of observation that is the core of this book: It is detached but deeply tender; detailed, but not prurient; it neither shouts and screams, nor does it look away. Guanzon’s telling offers a clear-eyed, uncomplicated, ground truth perspective on something that is even more relevant than when he wrote it. As fuel and food costs soar, things are only getting worse for families like Henry’s—it has spurred me to think more about how I can share from my own relative abundance.
Courtney Cook is a writer who works in a technology company. She lives in Wilder, VT and publishes a weekly newsletter, "Survival by Book," at courtneycook.substack.com. A longer version of this essay appeared in her newsletter.