The Names: Fascinating and Frustrating

 

 

 

The Names (2025)

By Florence Knapp

Viking/Penguin, 328 pages.

★★★

 

Perhaps you’ve heard of the “butterfly effect,” which avers that the smallest variable introduced into an experiment or scenario can dramatically alter the outcome. The movie Run, Lola, Run is a brilliant depiction of it. Novelist Florence Knapp plays with that butterfly premise in The Names.

 

The book opens as Cora, a former ballet dancer, and Gordon Atkin have just had a son. In Gordon’s mind there is only one choice for his name: Gordon. His family has had a Gordon for as many generations as anyone can remember. Cora doesn’t think it fits and prefers Julian, but her husband orders her to go to the city hall and register the name Gordon. Maia, the baby’s sister, has taken to calling her brother Bear and the name is growing on mom. When Cora actually registers the name Bear, Gordon goes ballistic. Although he is a skilled doctor respected by his patients, he’s a bully and an abuser who pummels Cora for defying his will. She gets it again when she goes to city hall and changes it to Julian. This time, something very serious happens to a neighbor.

 

What would have happened had the boy been named Bear? Or Julian? Knapp imagines differing scenarios via snapshots in six different years: 1987,1994, 2001, 2008, 2015, and 2022. Her stories are sometimes discrete and sometimes continuous. Remember, that a small change can lead to very different outcomes. Our supporting characters–father Gordon, Cora, her mother Sílbhe, Maia (“Bees”), and Cora’s friend Mehri–are retained, but depending upon the timeline they have different lives, friends, and personalities. 

 

Gordon 2 bears some of his father’s traits, though he is better at recognizing the effects of internalized anger. Nevertheless, Gordon 2 is mostly a reactive character, as if his father is a magnet and he a flimsy piece of metal. The externals of Gordon I change according to which timeline is at play. It’s hard to be specific without venturing into spoilers. It would be fair to say, though, that Gordon 2 has the least interesting life.

 

Bear is exactly as young Maia envisioned him. Most people like him and he ends up marrying his longtime squeeze Lily, though Bear’s quiet, cuddly charm presents challenges. As his name suggests, Bear loves nature. Julian, by contrast, moves to Ireland and develops a dislike for the English and crass commercialism. One of his grandmother’s former lovers, teaches Julian silversmithing and he goes on to become a skilled jeweler. He will wed Orla, also an artist.

 

It is often in the supporting cast where the butterfly changes manifest most dramatically. That’s because Knapp has something up her sleeve. We get more background on Sílbhe, who was once a hippie, and has had an (ahem!) adventurous love life. Maia is a lesbian who, in 2008 is married to a woman named Charlotte, but this changes. Mehri is Cora’s best friend, but her personality is fungible. Characters we’ve not previously met appear in different scenarios. 

 

As the novel wends its way through time, Knapp springs a surprise. Most of the characters appear in the same timeframe, as if there were a merging of the various Gordon I’s, Gordon 2’s, Bears, Julians, and Coras. This flight into the multiverse is common in graphic novels, but not every reader is going to applaud Knapp’s use of the technique. Frankly, I have mixed feeling about it. On one hand, it’s a bold shift; on the other, it’s often hard to figure out exactly what’s happening to whom and, if I might, who “whom” is at a given moment. Nor is it entirely clear what we are to conclude about Knapp’s foray into trifurcation. Any of a number of possibilities emerge. Is there one narrative with the same son switching identities? Are three parallel universes in play? It’s interesting to contemplate what another you would be like in a different universe, but it’s ultimately a dead end as we have objective evidence that a multiverse exists.  Knapp selected her time periods carefully: 1987 was the end of stagflation,1994 the year the first Web browser appeared, 2001 Y2K and terrorist attacks, 2008 the end of the Great Recession, 2015 the legalization of same-sex marriages, and 2022 the next page of her seven-year cycles. (Are we reading a postmodernist 7 Up?)

 

We can but speculate. I found The Names both a fascinating and perplexing read.

 

Rob Weir