Sam Wachman begins his debut novel, “The Sunflower Boys,” the way many coming-of-age novels begin. His 12-year-old first-person narrator, Artem, is wrestling with a charming dilemma. He receives a beautiful, leatherbound sketchbook as a birthday present and he feels it is too beautiful to tarnish with his amateur artwork. What should he draw?
The novel, set in Ukraine, is loosely organized around the answers to this question; its 100 chapters are titled by what he chooses to draw on each of the 100 blank pages. For the first 25 chapters, which take place from the middle of 2020 to the eve of Russia’s invasion in February of 2022, these images are vessels for the typical concerns that frequently appear in the genre. He struggles with certain subjects in school. He’s frustrated by his overprotective mother and his absent father, who is living in the United States where he can make more money. He realizes that he’s in love with his best friend, Viktor, and fears he’ll be ostracized because he’s gay.
Wachman, a Cambridge native, skillfully portrays pivotal emotional moments without pushing too hard and often captures the voice of an adolescent well. Early on, when Artem is hospitalized because of a seizure, he takes a straightforward approach: “I’m in the hospital, and I’m in the worst mood of my life.” And when Artem first begins to feel his attraction to Viktor, Wachman writes: “Something bursts to life in my chest, a new feeling for which I have no name. The feeling follows me to bed that night and keeps me awake and wondering.”
These effective, efficient moments prop up the prewar section of the book, which is otherwise rushed. The main issue is Wachman’s choice to narrate the book in the present tense, which severs Artem from the story he’s ostensibly telling because the plotting and pacing are all geared toward an invasion readers know is inevitable but he has no clue is coming. In practice, this means that information which will be useful later — phone numbers he’ll need, medicine he’ll have to remember — is prized over the texture of Artem’s day-to-day life.
When the war begins, “The Sunflower Boys” turns into a very different book. Time, once flying by, crawls. The present tense narration, once a rope caught on knots Wachman couldn’t untie, provides a discomfiting immediacy and is the foundation of its sickly propulsive pace.
At first, the war sends Artem, his little brother Yuri, and their mom to the basement of their apartment building in Chernihiv, a city in Northern Ukraine which Russia attempted to capture in the first days of the invasion. Safety is immediately elusive and temporary and the family is constantly on the run. In an early fleeting moment of stability, Artem’s imagination is revealed to already have been changed forever: “When I can’t sleep, I shut my eyes and imagine us a two-boy army, squinting through the sights of our machine guns and picking off the silhouettes of Russian soldiers the moment they appear on the horizon. Like a video game. Far enough that we don’t have to feel the killing.”
Reflections like this are inherently upsetting and their force is amplified in “The Sunflower Boys” as Wachman deploys them rarely. His restrained, unsentimental approach has Artem focused mostly on the destruction in front of him and the logistics of staying alive.
Artem and his family are subjected to the brutality of the Russian Army in a harrowing, nauseating sequence but for most of the book the explosions are somewhere in the distance. The threat of violence remains ever present but the tangible obstacles they face are primarily caused by the rapidly collapsed civil society. They trudge through regions with no electricity, no food, no clean water, and little shelter.
There are beautiful moments of selfless help from strangers and there are shocking moments of indifference or cruelty by strangers, too. These unflattering scenes are absent a moralizing sheen, conveying an understanding of the universal desperation everyone feels and the dangers that follow from that single-mindedness without judging people trying to survive in the same way Artem is.
It is strange, after the intensity of this experience, to arrive at the novel’s denouement. Like the beginning, it unfolds as a blur. Wachman’s writing in a much more conventional mode; the opening provides guidance that’s not required and the closing mends tears that are better as they are. “The Sunflower Boys” starts too early and ends too late.
These flaws are, nonetheless, outpaced by the novel’s successes. The line between a serious-minded confrontation with this pitch-black corner of humanity and an exploitive-seeming, schlocky book is thin as fishing line and he stays consistently on the right side. Everyone knows that war is hell and takes everything from those who are forced to endure it, but “The Sunflower Boys” makes you feel it. The invasion through Artem’s eyes is appropriately punishing. Wachman has a well-calibrated sense of which images will haunt and how much he has to show to achieve a maximum effect. The attention alive in his depiction of these horrific events is a rare trait, and the sign of a real artist.
THE SUNFLOWER BOYS
By Sam Wachman
Harper, 352 pages, $30
Bradley Babendir is a fiction writer, photographer, and critic in Somerville.