By John Schertzer

Ian S. Maloney’s South Brooklyn Exterminating tells neither the American story you often hear nor the typical New York or even Brooklyn story. What Maloney gives us instead is a Dante-esque tour of underworlds, and, at times, a paradise or two, along with a plausible and devastating portrait of a life that’s lived more frequently in America than we’d like to think.

The novel opens with Jim, a first-generation immigrant pulling Jonah, his seven-year-old son, out of bed in the wee hours of the morning to help him clean and fumigate a roach-infested plane that’s flown into Kennedy Airport from Singapore. Jonah—perhaps a surrogate for Maloney—had just been dreaming of playing baseball out in a far part of the galaxy or something like that.

Jim brings Jonah with him to countless jobs, like fetching wasp nests out of sky-scraping trees and waging battle against rats in basements, each job a descent into a hellscape affording Jim yet another chance to lecture, each indoctrination, which often features lines quoted from Emerson and Whitman, also a fatherly encouragement to Jonah to pursue a life in literature and writing, interests of Jonah’s that Jim wished he had pursued himself had circumstances allowed.

It’s no life for a kid. He should be getting his sleep and going off to school in the morning, but his father is not a bad father because of it. Jim—bound to this life, as he explains it—desperately wants to show young Jonah the very life he might fall into if he doesn’t reach for something better. So Jim, a consummate guide, turns out to be the novel’s Virgil.

It’s rather paradoxical, since Jonah is in truth being indoctrinated into doing both. He is told one thing but is trained as his father’s aspirant in the very tricks and a kind of seat-of-the-pants scholarship of being an exterminator, of knowing and living that kind of existence, while coming to the realization that it is human life that produces the environment in which the pests thrive, that, in a sense, human and rat existence are a kind of mutuality, and that rats and roaches are the mere underbelly of our civilized life. It is this very thing that makes Jonah’s life an exceptional one, with all its baked-in horrors and occasional excesses of beauty—the things his eyes will learn to see and appreciate in greater depth because of the contrast. And it is that very contrast that makes Ian S. Maloney’s first novel, South Brooklyn Exterminating, an exceptional read and beauty in itself.

But the hell Jonah faces doesn’t stop at pest control. The pressures of and revulsion toward the job end up driving his father mad, Jim subsequently institutionalized in a psychiatric facility for a while, but not before smashing up family furniture and heirlooms and nearly shooting himself in the head before twelve-year-old Jonah takes the pistol from Jim, who says, “Going to shoot me? End my misery? Not the first time you thought about killing me, I’m sure.” The moment is all the more poignant since their relationship had become so close by that time. Following this tragic episode, among the many scenes Maloney renders so deftly, Jonah rejects his father outright, refuses to talk or even look at him for a period of time.

Continuing on his own to do some of the work he’d done with his father, Jonah also lands a job at a lumber yard, where he is treated with greater indignity than he ever experienced when working with his father. Adrift, he spends time with friends graffitiing abandoned buildings along the coast of his native Marine Park. Here among the trash-strewn salt marshes by Gil Hodges Bridge is where Maloney becomes his most poetic. Maloney writes:

The garbage collected in the reeds and the muddy trails. Soda cans and fast-food Styrofoam containers multiplied by the hour. Glass jars and plastic bottles and aluminum cans bobbed up and down in the surf, and oil slicks were seen glinting in the sun-streaked ripples of the of the water. Sometimes a stolen bike was down there hidden under the branches of a low-hanging tree.

And:

Cordgrass and reeds forever swayed in the sea winds and the sounds of the avenue faded away. The salt marsh kept the currents at bay, a buffer for the shore for days and nights of high times and storm surges. Objects choked its efforts and I walked around, collecting them in piles for the rangers and can collectors.

Maloney is adept at portraying the power of nature amid the wretched residue of human living: Styrofoam cups and plastic bottles alongside hermit crabs, birds, and racoons. This setting is also where Jonah finds a small sunken boat, which he brings home and tries to repair on his own. But when he finally takes it out on the water, it sinks.

The fact of his father following Jonah, helping him rescue the sunken craft, subsequently spending long hours patching up and repainting its hull, making it sound for actual use is what salvages and repairs the relationship between them. It is after those events that they begin working together again. One may be reminded here about how we live our own metaphors, since the reparation of the boat and the relationship are one and the same.

Years after Jim had passed away from cancer, Jonah moves on to an academic job teaching English, just as his father had preached to him those many hours of working together. He was still attending occasional pest management lectures by Dr. Coughlin, a professor of rodentology though. Coughlin, who had known Jim and Jonah well, takes Jonah on a rat safari around the city for old time’s sake, the event culminating in a restricted area within the NYC subway system, where under infrared light they observe rats swarming, their deadly battles and social organizations, moreover, where the symbiosis between rat and human becomes most clear.

Though Maloney’s South Brooklyn Exterminating is largely about a relationship between a father and son, and the difficult worlds they shared, it also strikes with impressions of our relentless attempts at killing off parts of ourselves, and extensions of ourselves, this battle between us and the ever-unwanted, whether rodent or human, that has continued from the onset of civilization. We might begin to ask how we may better our relationship with these parts and other creatures whose existence we reluctantly sponsor, these desiring-machines swarming the Body without Organs, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari may have imagined it, since extermination of living things is not what we want to be our very best at, though it often seems to be that way—we, the masters of death. That was not, however, a choice that Jim and Jonah had been able to make within the world they lived in, a world much like the one we have been living within, a thing that will take an overhaul of thought and feeling to change.