Lessons

The actor Marc Bendavid’s debut novel begins with a series of deaths. The first is of a nameless “you,” who has opted for euthanasia. It is a rational, bureaucratic choice, administered by a medical professional in a procedure so precise that the narrator (also named Marc Bendavid) knows exactly which drugs are being injected into the patient’s arm, despite being on the other side of the continent when it happens. The other deaths took place twenty-five years earlier: the victims were Marc’s five chickens, which his family bought the summer before he entered middle school. The murders were horrifying and mysterious, the work of an unknown predator who picked the birds off one by one. These two scenes of loss are the chronological bookends of The Sapling. They also, in a subtler way, lay out its thematic territory: the disjunction between what can be named, categorized, and rationally explained and what remains ineffable because it is, like the hens’ fate...