What do you owe a sibling you feared as a child, who mistreated you both as a kid and as an adult? What constitutes a family? In CATBIRDS, a debut novel by Ezra Palmer, these are the questions his middle-aged protagonist, Randy, grapples with when his older brother, Adam, a former Wall Street wheeler dealer, is found dead, floating facedown in the Housatonic River. Adam alienated everybody with his bellicose and litigious behavior and had not spoken to anyone in his family for years except Randy, who would reach out to him occasionally out of a sense of obligation. Every time, Adam never seemed happy to see him, even actively sneered at him, leaving Randy wondering why he even bothered.

Still, he organizes a memorial service to pay tribute to Adam. It’s the waning days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we find Randy grappling with guilt, self-recrimination and anger at Adam as he waits for guests to arrive. He ruminates on his family, one that no longer exists. Adam is dead. Another brother, Willie, succumbed to AIDS years before, followed by his father, who died from Huntington’s disease. His mother, now remarried, barely talks to Randy.

Told from Randy’s perspective, this slim but potent literary novel is written as one long monologue, sans periods, question marks or even paragraph breaks, forcing the reader to read carefully. Slowly. That is not a criticism. This stream-of-consciousness style compels you to savor the compelling, magnetic prose. It’s a stylistic high-wire act which the writer balances with confidence. If you like authentic voices, sibling dynamics, and family drama, give CATBIRDS a read.

Thank you to #NetGalley for providing an ARC.

Ezra Palmer's debut is a stream-of-consciousness eulogy. Randy Green learns his brother Adam is dead in a marina three thousand miles away during the pandemic, and with minimal help from anyone else, he tries to figure out what actually happened. But more than that, he's trying to understand who his brother was, and maybe who he himself is in relation to all that damage and distance.
The prose reads like watching someone think in real time, circling back, contradicting himself, getting caught in loops of memory and speculation. The tangle of his language conveys how grief works, how our minds work when we're trying to make sense of loss.
What got to me was the portrait of this fractured family. There's no villain here, just people who couldn't quite reach each other, who hurt in ways they didn't know how to articulate. Randy's search for answers about Adam's death becomes inseparable from his reckoning with what was never said between them.
It's not a mystery that resolves neatly. That's the point. Some things don't have answers, and sometimes we have to write the story anyway—have to speak it aloud, even if we don't fully understand it.

Catbirds takes place at Randy’s memorial for his pugnacious brother, Adam, whose mysterious circumstances of death unsettles Randy, particularly given their fraught history. The narrative is a stream-of-consciousness of what goes through Randy’s head before the memorial starts, and takes the reader back — through their childhood, their distant adult lives, and Randy’s investigation into Adam’s final years. His thoughts cover various regrets and unanswered questions, and meander through family memories, often tense and bittersweet.

This slim book delightfully surprised me. I am skeptical of stream-of-consciousness prose (see: how long it is taking me to get off the ground with Ducks, Newburyport), but it’s very well done here. Some of the lines are repetitive, but it strikes me as authentic to Randy’s wandering manner of thinking.

Overall, I found it touching and very readable. I’d love to get my hand on a physical copy!

Thank you to NetGalley and Taag & Rohg Press for the ARC.

Catbirds, by Ezra Palmer, is a study in lack of communication within a dysfunctional family. The story takes place one hour before the memorial service for the eldest son Adam who drowned, alone and friendless, in a dirty back channel. He was a bully who was feared by his brothers, disliked by his mother who ignores her three eldest boys, and rarely remembered by his father. After reaching goals for success, i.e. captain of the high school football team, acceptance into Yale, a high powered position on Wall Street, Adam loses his wife, his mansion in Greenwich, and his securities license due questionable business practices and bad temper.

The narrator of Catbirds is his brother Randy, on whose shoulders it falls to deliver a eulogy. He grapples with what to say because of their stormy relationship in their youth. Randy feared his older brother, who mercifully left home and never came back after high school. To assuage his conscience about the lack of communication, Randy contacts Adam every couple of years, but the reunions are fraught with conflict. None of the rest of the family ever contacts Adam and won't miss him.

Catbirds is written as a stream of consciousness that follows Randy's reminiscence from his arrival at the library where he frets about his eulogy and the worry that no one with show up for the service. He relives the family's past, including his older brother Willie due to AIDS, brings out hundreds of mourners and their mother's abandonment of her ailing husband. This is a family that you are happy not to be a part of but Catbird is an interesting read.

"Boyland, my mother called it, the wild kingdom."

Catbirds is experimental. It ignores the concept of good punctuation and grammar almost entirely, spiralling onward in prose that is repetitive (deliberately so), cadenced like poetry, and mesmerising once you fall into its rhythm. It took me longer than I’d like to realise the formatting was intentional, but once I did, I really, really enjoyed what I was reading.

"...when he was a baby, she had said, he cried all the time, he was colicky, I just never knew what to do with, that's what she used to say about Adam, I just never knew what to do with him..."

The story follows Randy, attempting to write a eulogy for his eldest brother while confronting the manner of his death and everything that led to it. In a stream-of-consciousness that is sometimes frustratingly fragmented, Palmer paints the story of the four Green brothers (Adam, Willie, Randy, and Evan) growing up under absentee parents, in a world of conflict, violence, rivalry, and tenuous safety. The novel explores family and perception, how different people can live inside different realities, and how memory can fracture and wound.

"...in her mind I had abandoned Adam, I had ignored him at a time when he needed me, it hurt me to hear that, of course, because a part of me saw it that way, too..."

It’s raw and real and confused and laden with grief. It’s not pretty, it’s not perfect, but it is very, very good. Beautiful and upsetting, it made me think about my own relationships with my siblings (markedly healthier than the Greens') and about questions that haunt many families: where do you lay blame, when do you set down guilt, and at what point is blood no longer thicker than water?

For readers who appreciated Sally Rooney’s style in Normal People or Conversations with Friends, Palmer’s unique prose might do the trick. I’ll be looking out eagerly for future work.

Thank you to Netgalley as well as Taag & Rohg for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

4 and 1/2 stars (rounded up to 5).

Catbirds explores the deep, complex, and sometimes-maddening ties of family. As Randy untangles what led up to his brother’s death—and his own possible role—it raises old issues of obligation, expectation, and loyalty. Ultimately, Catbirds is an exploration of the boundaries of loss and love: What do we owe our parents? Our siblings? And how far does that go when one’s own survival is at stake?

The answers offer a portrait of family relationships, told through Randy’s thoughts in the moments before his brother’s memorial service is about to start that is both original and universal, This is a remarkable debut novel.

Wonderful writing, lovely presentation. Family dysfunction and toxicity run rampant across the narrator's search for meaning in his hated brother's mysterious death.