Book Review: The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis (Knopf; 256 pages; $24.95).

            Reading Ayana Mathis’ epic debut The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, I could not help but think of the poem “A Dream Deferred” by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes (1902-1967).

What happens to a dream deferred?

 

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

and then run?

Does it stink like rotting meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

 

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

 

Or does it explode?[1]

 

Hattie, Mathis’ central character, and her family left their home in Georgia as part of the African-American exodus to the North during the Great Migration. Six million blacks moved out of the rural South to the Northeast, Midwest, and West from around 1910 to 1970.

 

When their exodus began, slavery had long been abolished.  Yet, African-Americans were still very much bound.  Segregation, discrimination, and physical violence prompted blacks to hope for better lives in urban centers like Chicago and New York City.  Some may have had families in those cities; others set out with uncertainty, knowing no one but desperate for better lives.  The dreams of many were fulfilled as they found jobs and discovered new avenues open to them.  The dreams of others, as Hughes lyrically laments, were deferred.

 

Hattie belongs in the latter category. In 1925, she and her husband, August, live in Philadelphia, where they rent a house and where August works long hours.  Hattie gives birth to twins, Philadelphia and Jubliee, appellations “that weren’t already chiseled on a headstone in the family plots in Georgia…names of promise and of hope, reaching forward names, not looking back ones.”

The names she chooses for her children are significant.  Philadelphia represents their new home, the city of Philadelphia.  Hattie has high hopes for her family’s future in this great city.  The name then carries with it all of Hattie’s optimisms and dreams.  The name Jubilee evokes echoes of the African-American Juneteenth celebrations that marked the end of slavery (the first celebration occurred June 19, 1865).  In the North, Hattie’s children are free and do not have to worry about seeing August beaten, as Hattie once saw happen to her own father.  In Philadelphia, Hattie is certain that her twins will have opportunities she did not have growing up in Georgia.

 

When the twins become ill with pneumonia at seven months old, Hattie’s world is shaken. She tries to lessen their cough with eucalyptus, but the plant is difficult to find in Philadelphia.  When Hattie finds the plant, she has to buy it.  This feels so wrong to her.  Back home in Georgia, a eucalyptus tree is located directly “across from Hattie’s house.”  Such a stark realization leaves her bitter–especially when she cannot save them.

 

What happens to a dream deferred?  For Hattie, losing the twins is earth-shattering.  She feels as if a part of her dies with Philadelphia and Jubilee.  Hattie and August go on to have other children, but Hattie is never the same after the tragedy.

 

For her other offspring to survive in this world, Hattie must harden herself so she can harden them.  If they are to survive, then Hattie must be a survivor.  She will hold them at arm’s length if it means they will reach adulthood.  She will close herself off from them if it means they will grow up.

 

Mathis then switches gears and focuses on what happens to Hattie’s eleven children and one grand-child, her twelve tribes.  When we meet each of Hattie’s progeny in wholly intimate chapters, they are all on the cusp of something: grappling with identity, homophobia, abuse, jealousy, and sickness.  Mathis also illustrates through these chapters how Hattie’s children see her as a cold, bitter, and sometimes hateful woman.   The structure of the chapters also allows us to see how things change as the years pass.  Although Hattie and August grow apart, she still stays with him, even after she has a baby by another man and runs away.  She feels bound to August and stays by his side through affairs and economic hardships.  

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie cuts to the quick.  Mathis employs incisive, gritty dialogue that lodges itself deep in the hearts and guts of readers.  She can be elegantly precise yet equally coarse and raw when necessary, showing an amazing range of talent.

 

For me, Mathis’ other characters pale next to Hattie.  The author provides fascinating windows into Hattie’s psyche through her twelve tribes.  We know what they do not.  We know why she is cold, bitter, and sometimes hateful.

 

Mathis is by no means using Hattie to represent all African-American women who left the South to make new lives in the North.  Instead, Mathis is re-presenting one possible story through the character of Hattie.  Mathis wants to show the gritty underbelly of a family who took part in the Great Migration with all the sufferings and ordeals such an epic journey would entail.

 

Hattie’s dream of a new life did not go the way she had hoped it would.  Hattie’s was a dream deferred that festered, crusted over, and dried up.  Surely, Hattie would say her heart rotted and stank.  Perhaps she exploded from the pain.  Hattie had to survive so her children would.  What a heavy load she carried.  What a stunning literary achievement from Mathis as she chronicles one woman’s trials and tribulations.  The Twelve Tribes of Hattie resonates with meaning and with beauty.

 

 

---

[1] Langston Hughes, “Harlem” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 1994 by The Estate of Langston Hughes.

Book Review: The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg

The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg (Grand Central Publishing; 273 pages; $24.99).

            If Edie Middlestein, the main character in Jami Attenberg’s hefty, hearty novel The Middlesteins, had a favorite commercial, it would surely be the one about chocolate chip cookies.  You know the one.  A grandmother bakes cookies for her granddaughter’s soccer team.  The girls devour them after their victory and look lovingly at the grandmother in gratitude.  One of the girl’s mothers gets an idea to bake her college-age daughter chocolate chip cookies when she is home from school.  Mother and daughter bond in the kitchen over the gooey, delicious goodies.

The commercial’s message conveys the same sentiments that Edie learned from her parents as a child.  “Food was made of love, and love was made of food, and if it could stop a child from crying, then there was nothing wrong with that either.”

In the minds of Edie’s parents, withholding food from their child, who weighed 62 pounds at age five, was akin to starving her.  Edie’s father had starved during his journey from the Ukraine to Chicago years previously and “had never been able to fill himself up since.”  Neither Edie’s mother nor her father had the heart to deny Edie food, even though the child is tired all the time from her extra weight.

Even at five, Edie “breathed too heavy, like someone’s gassy old uncle after a meal” and “hated taking the stairs; she begged to be carried up the four flights to their apartment, her mother uchhing, her back, the groceries, a bag of books from the library.”  Her parents did nothing about Edie’s weight problem.  “If Edie, their beloved, big-eyed, already sharp-witted daughter, was big for her age, it did not matter.”  They could never refuse her food because that would be like holding back their love.  “Because how could they not feed her?”

As Edie grows up, she also grows out.  She marries and has children, who grow up and have lives of their own.  Food is still a constant in her life, more than a constant really; Edie needs food.  For Edie, food provides everyday sustenance and survival, yes, but she uses food as a crutch to cope with the deaths of her parents, her own insecurities and problems, and a painful separation from her husband, Richard.  Food thus becomes her solace, her best friend, and her psychiatrist.  Food never abandons her; food never complains about her weight; food never tells her she’s not good enough.  Doctors warn Edie that her alarming obesity is killing her, but she pays them no mind.

The Author

Family members do their best to help Edie.  Robin, her daughter, wants her fatherto pay for leaving her mother.  Rachelle, Edie’s daughter-in-law, fears Edie may be beyond help when she follows her one day from McDonald’s to Burger King to a Chinese restaurant and watches in horror as Edie gorges herself on these take-outs.  When Edie is forced to undergo surgery, it is her son, Benny, who stays up all night making sure his mother does not eat after midnight.  Benny knows she cannot resist food, even when it means life or death.

In The Middlesteins, Attenberg puts a real face to our nation’s obesity epidemic.  Attenberg’s unflinching portrayal of Edie is wholly empathetic.  She lays Edie bare before us and forces us to acknowledge something surprising: Edie’s addiction to food is not that different from all of our fixations, be they shopping, sports, fitness, gambling, sex, alcohol, or drugs.  Edie’s obesity is just more noticeable because it is a physical manifestation of her addiction to food.  In other words, we can see the evidence of Edie’s overeating while we are often blind-sided by the hidden compulsions of others.

Attenberg’s The Middlesteins is a robust, warm-hearted, and hugely entertaining story of love, family, food, and loss.  With elegant and clever prose, Attenberg makes a hot-button political topic a very personal one.  The Middlesteins is poignant, enormously big-hearted, and universally appealing.

 

Book Review: May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes

May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes (Viking; 480 pages; $27.95).

If your family is anything like the Silvers in A.M. Homes’ black comedy May We Be Forgiven, you’re glad the holidays are over.  Homes is fierce and fearless in her depiction of a Twenty-First century family in crisis.  She knows just how to blend satire with realism, just how to mix tragedy with comedy, just how to make her pages sizzle.

Homes’ characters are deeply flawed people, yet they are nothing but real.  Harold Silver, her most important character, cannot help but be jealous of his little brother, George.  While Harold is a Richard Nixon scholar and historian, his brother is a powerful and wealthy television executive with a beautiful wife, two children, and a gorgeous home.   What Harold doesn’t envy about George is his violent temper.

The dominoes fall one by one when George gets into a car accident, killing a mother and father and leaving their young son injured and orphaned.  If that were not enough for one week, George snaps when he comes home to find his wife in bed with Harold.  He grabs the bedside lamp and hits her over the head with it.  These are not spoilers; they happen within the novel’s first fifteen pages.

The story is not about these events anyway: rather, May We Be Forgiven is about how Harold seeks atonement for his part in the tragedy.  He blames himself.  If he had not been having an affair with his sister-in-law, then perhaps he could have averted catastrophe.  Harold becomes the guardian of his brother’s children, Nate and Ashley.  He also feels responsible for the orphaned boy.  As Harold assumes a new life so different from the one he had before, he seeks absolution.

Although Homes’ characters are completely unlikeable and unrelatable, they are strangely fascinating.  Harold is Homes’ most well-developed character.  When he is asked to edit a series of fictional stories written by Nixon, Harold jumps at this opportunity.  He sees Nixon as a father figure.  As Harold tries to atone for his own misdeeds, he seeks to assuage history’s view of the president.  It makes for compelling reading.

In fact, I challenge you to stop reading this story.  Once you start, you cannot stop.  Homes’ pacing is quick.  Her punches are like those of a boxer’s.  Surprises permeate on every page.

Sometimes, though, it is just too much.  It is as if Homes tries to one-up herself on every page, producing an over-abundance of shocking scenes with little or no segue between them.  Reading Homes’ novel can be like running a marathon; you are gasping for breath.  Homes, in certain instances, just goes too far, most notably when Harold instructs his niece on how to use a tampon.  Shock value is a tool that should not be overused, even when writing a black comedy.  A little can go a long way.

Homes is unapologetically irreverent in May We Be Forgiven.  That’s why this is not a book for everyone.  If you enjoy dark comedies, you will love this story.  If you are not a fan of black comedy, stay far away.

 

 

Spotlight on May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes

I am reading May We Be Forgiven by the amazingly talented A.M. Homes. It’s an irreverent and provocative work of black comedy.

From the jacket copy:

“Harold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his younger brother, George, a taller, smarter, and more successful high-flying TV executive, acquire a covetable wife, two kids, and a beautiful home in the suburbs of New York City. But Harry, a historian and Nixon scholar, also knows George has a murderous temper, and when George loses control the result is an act of violence so shocking that both brothers are hurled into entirely new lives in which they both must seek absolution.

Harry finds himself suddenly playing parent to his brother’s two adolescent children, tumbling down the rabbit hole of Internet sex, dealing with aging parents who move through time like travelers on a fantastic voyage. As Harry builds a twenty-first-century family created by choice rather than biology, we become all the more aware of the ways in which our history, both personal and political, can become our destiny and either compel us to repeat our errors or be the catalyst for change.

May We Be Forgiven is an unnerving, funny tale of unexpected intimacies and of how one deeply fractured family might begin to put itself back together.”

It’s the perfect Thanksgiving read!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Book Review: Little Sinners, And Other Stories by Karen Brown

Little Sinners, And Other Stories by Karen Brown (University of Nebraska Press; 208 pages; $17.95).

 

            Author Karen Brown has won several awards for her fiction writing.  Reading her new tightly-knit, intimate collection of short stories entitled Little Sinners, And Other Stories, it is easy to understand why.  Brown’s first collection, Pins and Needles, won the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction.  Her stories have appeared in The Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009 and The Best American Short Stories 2008.  Little Sinners recently received the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction.  When you read Brown’s work, you know you are in the hands of a skillful craftsman in her prime.  Little Sinners is seductive and captivating as it explores the complicated and complex world of domesticity.

 

Although Brown features male characters, most of her principal personalities are women.  Brown’s world is a woman’s world, one in which females defy stereotypes and carve out places and roles of their own.  Unexpected consequences ensue, and the women must always pick up the pieces in the aftermath.  All of Brown’s stories are very true to life because, as women, we know that is often the case.

 

Her vignettes are slices of domestic life, written with passion and, above all, realism. Some tales are erotic; some are suspenseful; all are compelling.  Among the strongest stories in the collection are the title story “Little Sinners,” “Swimming,” “Stillborn,” “The Philter,” and “An Heiress Walks into a Bar.”

 

An adult woman remembers a horrible trick she and her best childhood friend played on a little girl in “Little Sinners.”  “We weren’t bad girls,” the narrator insists.  “We were feral, unequivocally vicious, like girls raised by the mountain lions that occasionally slunk out of the wilderness….”  The girls never expected what happened next, and the woman still carries a great amount of guilt many years later.

 

In “Swimming,” a married woman and her lover swim the pools of her neighbors in the dark of night.  When they are seen, they become the talk of the neighborhood.  The woman, though, is in for a big surprise when she catches her daughter and a boy in the family pool.

 

“Stillborn” is my favorite of Brown’s short stories and also her best.  Diana, who is six-months pregnant, and her husband move into a cottage on the Long Island Sound.  He has cheated on his wife but promises it won’t happen again.  Diana seeks solace in the garden.  She digs in the dirt only to discover small bones buried there.  “Femur, fibula, humerus, clavicle.  Tiny bones, delicate and dirt-stained,” Brown writes.  Diana “stopped digging, the bones uncovered.”  She thinks, “I’ve dug too deep.”  The bones are of a baby.  Diana assumes the child was stillborn; the parents, she guesses, buried the dead infant in their yard as was the custom in earlier days.  However, when Brown shifts perspective from Diana to her neighbor, Mrs. Merrick, we see a different, and darker, side of the story.  This is truly where Brown shines as she shows domestic relationships, like plants in a garden, can have blights.

 

The most disturbing and chilling of all the stories in Little Sinners is “The Philter.”   Kit, a troubled housewife, meets Sarah in a grocery store.  Sarah’s mother has disappeared; the teen confides in Kit and practically drags her to her home for dinner.  When Sarah shows Kit how she spies on her own house, the duo see way more than they bargained for.  There is a voyeuristic quality and an illicitness to this piece.  Brown focuses on silences, what is unspoken, and on body language.  I was just as uncomfortable as Kit seemed to be.  It becomes clear that there is more to the disappearance of Sarah’s mother.

 

In another favorite story of mine, “An Heiress Walks into a Bar,” Esme is diagnosed with the same kind of cancer that killed her mother.  She grapples with her own mortality and the absence of her father, who disappeared years before.  When she was twelve, “her father put on his pale blue pinstripe suit, custom-made for a previous trip to the Bahamas, and left, never to be heard from again.”

 

Brown’s emotional stories cut to the quick.  They wound; they scar.  The stories in Little Sinners are intelligent, dark, deep, and murky, much like a woman’s soul.  Brown has a keen sense of what works.  At only 194 pages, Little Sinners is short, but its issues are weighty.  I dare you to read Little Sinners and come away empty.

People Get Weird At Weddings

Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead (Knopf; 320 pages; $25.95).

 

            There are weddings, and then there are weddings.  Destination weddings.  Weekend weddings.  Lavish weddings.  Small weddings.  Weddings where drunken bridesmaids sleep with equally inebriated groomsmen.  Even Shotgun weddings where no one has to guess “is she or isn’t she?”  The wedding of Daphne Van Meter features a little of all of the above in Maggie Shipstead’s strong, hilarious debut novel Seating Arrangements, part social satire and part serious examination of a man’s mid-life crisis.

Shipstead is a California girl who sets her story on an exclusive New England island.  Although a wedding occurs in her tale, Shipstead’s story is not really about the ceremony itself; Shipstead is concerned with the events and details that lead up to the big day.

Daphne’s wedding is the social event of the season.  Daphne, though, can lie back on her beach towel and relax.  She is no blushing bride; Daphne is seven months pregnant.  Both Daphne’s parents and the groom’s parents pushed the couple into walking down the aisle pronto.  If his daughter had a child “out of wedlock,” Winn Van Meter “would die.”  If it had been up to Daphne, though, she would not have gotten married so soon. “If I really had my way,” Daphne confesses, “We’d wait a while so I wouldn’t have to be pregnant in the pictures.”  More than anything else, Daphne does not want to be a “fat bride.”  However, she acquiesces to her father, because she knows how much appearances matter to him.

Winn is truly the novel’s main character.  Winn Van Meter is a 59-year-old, Harvard-educated, wealthy WASP enduring a mid-life crisis.  As Shipstead writes, “people get weird at weddings,” and that is certainly true of Winn.

Shipstead, a 29-year-old woman, ably gets readers into the head of Winn using flashbacks and streams of consciousness.  She uses Winn to satirize New England’s upper-crust culture, but her writing turns serious and somber when we realize how alone Winn feels and how he just wants to be liked.

Seating Arrangements, in my view, is a metaphor.  Seating charts at weddings are complicated affairs.  Just ask Winn’s wife, Biddy, who agonizes over the seating arrangements.  Preparing them means enemies and exes may find themselves seated next to each other, although this is to be avoided at all costs.  Some guests will be downgraded to the “leftovers table.”  Winn prepares his own kind of seating arrangements in this novel as he takes stock of the people in his life: how they have rewarded him, remained loyal to him, disdained him, slighted him, and excluded him.  Nearing sixty, he places them in certain niches, exactly where he thinks they should belong.

Above all, Winn appreciates exclusivity; he yearns for it, in fact.  For that reason, he “summers” on private Waskeke island.  Only the very best will do for him and his family.  Tradition is important to Winn, just as it was imperative to his father.  While at Harvard, Winn joined the elite club called the “Ophidian.”  He worries an old rival, Jack Fenn, who did not get into the Ophidian, may be blackballing his acceptance into the “Pequod,” a privileged golf club.  “People,” Winn knows, “will go to great lengths for revenge on those who have excluded them.”

Worst of all, Winn fears his exclusion from the Pequod may have something to do with his younger daughter, Livia.  Since he spends a great deal of time worrying over what is correct and proper, he cannot help but wonder if his daughters are disparaging his good name.  Just look at Daphne, seven-months pregnant on her wedding day.  A similar, yet different, thing happened to Livia.  While at Harvard, Livia got pregnant by her boyfriend Teddy Fenn, the son of Winn’s would-be nemesis.  Winn went through the roof.  In the end, Livia got an abortion and Teddy broke up with her.  Winn worries this incident will forever bar him from gaining acceptance to the Pequod.  How he wishes for sons when he thinks of all his daughters have put him through.

Despite Winn’s preoccupation with appearances, he contemplates a fling with Agatha, one of Daphne’s bridesmaids.  Agatha is in her twenties and woos and is wooed by Winn.  For Winn, Agatha is like “the fountain of youth.”  He describes any romance the two would have as a “May-December” one.  Winn feels as though Agatha truly likes him and understands him, qualities he appreciates, especially in a young, beautiful woman.  He and his wife have grown apart, and he idolizes Agatha just as much as he idealizes her.  Agatha, though, has a roving eye and roving hands.

Hilarious scenes such as when Winn and Livia catch Agatha with a groomsman inflagrante delicto contrast sharply with the novel’s serene island setting.  Hoopla abounds in this tale, whether it is when Winn gets run over at the golf course and wonders if he can take advantage of the accident to get into the Pequod or when the groom’s brother causes a dead whale’s carcass to explode.  The whole novel makes for good social satire.  Shipstead’s intention is to make your mouth fall open agape while reading what someone said or did.

Interestingly, one of Shipstead’s characters also responds to the Van Meters in this way.  With uncanny and masterful ability, Shipstead shifts perspective in one chapter, showing how a situation or issue looks different based on one’s viewpoint, age, gender, and class.  Nowhere is this more apparent than when Shipstead writes for Dominique, a bridesmaid from Egypt.  Dominique has known Daphne and her family for years.  She knows how the Van Meters and others like them work: “They were set up to accommodate feigned ignorance, unspoken resentment, and repressed passion the way their houses had back stairways and rooms tucked away behind the kitchen for the feudal ghosts of their ancestors’ servants.”  Dominique was “surprised Winn had not leapt from a bridge or gutted himself with a samurai sword after his daughters got knocked up back to back.”  ”Daphne’s condition,” Dominique thinks, “would be grandfathered into the boundaries of propriety by the wedding, but Livia’s phantom pregnancy, the missing buldge under her green dress at the front of the church, was a void that could not be satisfactorily filled in and smoothed over.”  In her view, Winn “had the Pequod to take his mind off things” and “set out on his quest for membership like Don Quixote without a Sancho.”

Dominique’s reaction is our reaction.  She is, by turns, fascinated by them and repulsed by them.  So are we.  But, Dominique does her duty.  She will be the supportive bridesmaid and keep her judgments to herself.  Perhaps Dominique’s character also symbolizes Shipstead herself.  Shipstead graduated from Harvard and met hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Van Meter-like families.  Maybe Dominique’s take on the Van Meters was exactly what Shipstead thought of the New England families she came into contact, obsessed with social status, elitism, and correctness.

            Seating Arrangments is THE read of the summer, but this is no fluff piece.  Shipstead constructs a many-layered story in the same way a baker creates a layered wedding cake or a designer sews a wedding gown.  There are layers upon layers, and we must peel them back chapter by chapter. There are debut novels, and then there are debut novels.  Messy, disorganized jumbles lacking cohesion.  Unrealized characters with nothing to drive them.  Settings that fall flat.  A plot that isn’t.  This is not one of those debut novels.

Book Review: The World Without You by Joshua Henkin

The World Without You by Joshua Henkin (Pantheon; 336 pages; $25.95).

 

            Marilyn and David Frankel, loving parents to four adult children, are living their worst nightmare in Joshua Henkin’s new novel The World Without You.  Their son, Leo, a journalist, was captured in Iraq, accused of being a U.S. agent, paraded before cameras, and executed on July 4, 2004.  It was almost too much for his family to bear.

President George W. Bush only made matters worse when he called Leo an ally in the war against terror.  Marilyn wants to “spit on Bush.”  “The nerve of that man,” she says, “to claim my son as his ally.”  Leo “hated that war” and was never “political.”  Leo’s parents still struggle one year later as the whole family reunites for his memorial service.

Leo’s death threatens to tear his family apart.  Marilyn and David’s forty-two-year marriage is on the verge of collapse.  They no longer talk like they once did.  Marilyn channels all of her grief and rage into anti-war op-ed pieces she writes for newspapers.  They tell their remaining children (Clarissa, Lily, and Noelle) they plan to separate.  Marilyn tries to explain their reasons for splitting up: “We lost our son.”  Leo’s death, Marilyn says, “ruined” them.  The more Marilyn vocalizes her grief, the more silent David becomes.  He stages a “mute protest” and furiously prepares their vacation home for its eventual sale after their divorce.

The Frankel sisters are having a difficult time themselves.  Eldest daughter Clarissa desperately wants a baby, but conception is proving difficult.  Throughout the story, Clarissa remembers holding Leo when he was an infant.  She thought of herself as “Leo’s second mother.”  “In a lot of ways,” Clarissa reveals, “I thought of myself as his first mother.”  Not until his death did she truly want a child; now, it may be too late.

Lily, the second sister, has been with her boyfriend for over a decade.  They are happily unmarried and childless, although everyone has a hard time accepting this fact.  Her father asks Lily about it and she tells him that if she and Malcolm “were to have children, we probably would be married, just because it would be easier on them if we did.”  For Lily, if it happens, it happens.

Noelle is Leo’s third and least likeable sister.  Noelle, former wild child, became an Orthodox Jew and moved to Israel with her husband, Amram.  They have four sons.  Amram recently lost his job.  The constraints of their religion threaten their marriage.  Noelle seems uncertain who she is anymore and who she wants to become.  Amram disappears after an argument, and his absence weighs heavily on Noelle and her sons.  One of the boys forgets his toilet training.  It all becomes too much for her: “It’s Amram’s fault, yet it’s her fault, too; she might as well not be able to keep her own bladder in check.  Sleeping with whatever boy came her way.  What good is her newfound modesty when she can’t control things any more than she ever could?”  Noelle cannot “control her husband and she can’t control her children, and what good is she if she can’t do that?”

Thisbe, Leo’s widow and the mother of his son, also attends the memorial service.  She is a graduate student in California.  During her visit, Thisbe struggles with two secrets of her own.  She tries to navigate the choppy waters of a family she married into but no longer feels a part.  Thisbe felt like being in the presence of the Frankels was like “being swallowed by a many-tentacled beast and made into a tentacle” herself.  When she and Leo married, Thisbe thought his sisters became hers.  When Leo died, Thisbe felt like she experienced a two-fold loss: her husband and her newly-acquired sisters.

The Frankels truly are a bereft, heartbroken family.  The passage of time has not healed their wounds.  There is a gulf between family members, and this chasm is ever-widening.

Henkin’s narrative underscores how loss makes people do strange things.  Each person experiences grief in his or her own individual way.  A grief manual for dummies does not exist.  Henkin ably illustrates how Leo’s death affects his parents, his sisters, his wife, and others around him.  The themes Henkin focuses on in his story are universal ones, such as love, loss, war, redemption, and forgiveness.  Henkin ably tells the story from many different perspectives, allowing the reader to understand one person’s grief process is distinct from another’s.  There is strong anti-war sentiment to this family’s heartwrenching tale.

Marilyn, especially, is vitriolic against Bush and blames him for her son’s death.  Through Marilyn, Henkin shows the depth of a mother’s love for her son, the bonds mother and child share, and how her whole world has crumbled.  For her, life without Leo is bleak.

The gloom in this novel is as thick as New England fog or cloud cover: “It’s like we’re going through this cloud cover, and then there’s more cloud cover and more cloud cover and it never stops.”  Despite the dark climate of Henkin’s story, there is always hope.  That hope comes in the guise of Leo’s 94-year-old grandmother.

The World Without You is a tension-filled, character-driven account of the downward spiral of an American family.  Just when things seem darkest, though, sometimes a ray of sunlight shines through the storm clouds.  Henkin’s story will engage you.  His characters will linger long after you finish the novel.  What’s more, his story will force you to put yourself and your family in the Frankel’s place.  How would you react to such tragedy?  How would you cope?  I daresay everyone would unravel.  Everyone would come apart at the seams.  That makes the Frankels and Henkin’s story very real.

Spotlight on The World Without You

Today is the publication day for Joshua Henkin’s latest novel The World Without You.

 I read, make that devoured, this book Saturday night and loved every minute of it.  So will you!

Henkin’s themes are universal: love, loss, forgiveness, and redemption, along with a strong anti-war sentiment.  At its heart, the story is about a family coping with grief.  Each family member handles the death of Leo in his or her own, individual way.  There is no manual for dummies on how to deal with something like this.

The World Without You is my pick of the week.  I urge you to pick this one up and read it.  I am certain you will grow to feel part of the Frankel family, just like I did.

I will be reviewing the novel tomorrow so stay tuned for my review!

A Modern Family on Holiday

The Red House by Mark Haddon (Doubleday; 272 pages; $25.95).

 

            A death in the family.  A brother and sister estranged.  A holiday.  A house in the country.  What a perfect setting for comedy and tragedy as Mark Haddon, the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, returns with a new novel about a modern family and all its triumphs and insecurities in The Red House.  Haddon pulls back the layers of a family to display them at their absolute worst.  Yet, only then, curiously, can they fully understand each other.

 

Richard and Angela, both middle-aged, are siblings.  Their mother recently passed away of a long illness closely resembling dementia.  Richard and Angela have not been close since their teens.  “Angela and Richard,” Haddon writes, “had spent no more than an afternoon in each other’s company over the last fifteen years.”  Many bottled-up emotions threaten to overpower them both.  The siblings never “felt like brother and sister, just two people who spoke briefly on the phone every few weeks or so to manage the stages of their mother’s decline.”

 

In a conciliatory gesture, Richard and his wife, Louisa, rent a country house in England for a week and invite Angela and her family.  Everyone arrives with lots of literal and figurative baggage.

 

Richard had “remarried six months ago, acquiring a stepdaughter in the bargain.”  He is a doctor who may be facing a malpractice suit when he returns from holiday.  His new wife, Louisa, has a past and tries too hard to fit into Richard’s life, even if that means losing the person she is.  Louisa’s daughter, Melissa, thinks she is a “princess,” better than everyone else.  Melissa and some friends bullied another girl to the point she attempted suicide.

 

Angela loses her grip on reality and suffers from the same debilitating illness her mother had.  Her husband, Dominic, is having an affair.  Their son, Alex, flirts shamelessly with both Louisa and Melissa.  Daisy, their daughter, finds herself caught between her religion and homosexuality.  Benjy, the baby, loves fantasies and who could blame him with this family?

 

The holiday is the perfect set-up for long-held grudges, pent-up emotions, dark family secrets, jealousies, resentments, bottled-up desires to rear their ugly heads.  The Red House is Shakespearean tragic-comedy at its best.

 

There are no chapters in The Red House; instead, Haddon divides the novel into days of the week.  Haddon begins the novel on a Friday and ends the following Friday.  Structuring the novel in such a way enables Haddon to use flash fiction to tell his story.

 

Employing short bursts of narrative, Haddon writes little vignettes, often consisting of only a few paragraphs.  Reading the book, I felt as if I had become the house in question in the novel.  It was as if I were eavesdropping on the characters, but only for three to five minutes before traveling on to see what the others were up to.

 

Think also of changing the channel on a television.  For a few moments, you manage to get a feel for what is being broadcast before you change the channel once again.  Millions of stimuli bombard you just in that short length of time.  That is what reading The Red House feels like, and this reader was entranced.

 

Flash fiction has not been around long.  In fact, only within the last year have I read this sub-genre of literary fiction.  Most flash fiction consists of only about 100 or so words or one or two paragraphs.  Haddon does not limit himself to a specific word or paragraph count.  Flash fiction can often become gimmicky, but not for Haddon and not with The Red House.  Haddon remains in control of his story and in control of his use of flash fiction.  This is not that simple to do.  Done right, flash fiction can be beautiful, as it is here.

 

Haddon writes with depth and nuance.  He uses body language in such a way that what is unspoken carries just as much significance as what is said.  The conflicts of Haddon’s characters drive this story, no matter if they are inner ones or those between characters or even against nature.  Haddon points out that only when conflicts are resolved can we go on with life.  While his conclusion is satisfying, some problems are solved while others are only beginning.  Such is life and family.

 

I recommend The Red House for fans of Peter Orner’s Love and Shame and Love and Lou Beach’s 420 Characters.

Mark Haddon

It Just Runs In The Family

The Green Shore by Natalie Bakopoulos (Simon & Schuster; 368 pages; $25).

 

Good writing must run in the Bakopoulos family.  Brother and sister, Dean and Natalie Bakopoulos have written three books between them.  Dean is the author of Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon (2004) and My American Unhappiness (2011).  This year, Natalie joins her brother with the release of her lush and picturesque debut The Green Shore.  They are the children of immigrants; their mother is Ukrainian and their father is Greek.  In a nod to her father’s birthplace, Natalie sets her story mostly in Greece and focuses on a dark period of the country’s history, one that is virtually unknown to most: the 1967 to 1974 military dictatorship.

 

This period in Greek history, quite honestly, was Greek to this reviewer.  Natalie Bakopoulos, though, takes this event and personalizes it.  In her novel, the political becomes personal, and the personal becomes political.

 

Bakopoulos does this by introducing readers to one Greek family and telling the story from multiple perspectives: Eleni, the matriarch and doctor with a passion for healing; her brother Mihalis, a poet who was once in exile; her daughter Sophie, a rebel at heart who flees Greece for Paris; and younger daughter Anna, a reluctant revolutionary but perhaps the fiercest of them all.  Revolution and resistance seem to be part of this family’s DNA sequence.  They all resist the military junta, yet each finds unique ways to oppose the colonels.  This family truly drives Bakopoulos’s story as we see what revolution will do to a country, a city, a community, and a family.

 

Since Bakopoulos is part Greek, she is intimately aware of Greek history and tradition.  Her knowledge and familiarity with Greece make this story all the more authentic.  Early on in the novel, Eleni and the rest of the family celebrate Easter.  Each takes a dyed-red egg.  Bakopoulos writes, “As was tradition, they would each take a hard-boiled, bright red egg and hit it together with the adjacent person’s, first the pointed end and then the round.  The last one with an intact egg was destined to have good fortune for the rest of the year.”  Reading this description, I could not help but wonder if the family itself would be cracked and broken by novel’s end.  Bakopoulos’s use of this Greek tradition is clever foreshadowing.

 

Although the family is intact by the end of the book, the dictatorship has altered each of them.  Eleni decides to help those people who have been tortured and abused by the government.  She, along with an intriguing man she meets, opens up a free clinic in secret.  This is Eleni’s way of resisting the junta.  Mihalis, meanwhile, continues to write and speak out against the colonels.  He, more than the others, is on the military’s radar since he is an artist and former exile.  His vitriol, not surprisingly, gets him into trouble once again.  It is Mihalis’s spirit that Sophie has inherited.  She and her boyfriend, Nick, get caught up in the early days of the revolution.  The colonels take Nick prisoner and Sophie flees to Paris.

 

The Paris setting allows Bakopoulos to explore another locale, but the heart of this novel lies in Greece, not in France.  And it shows in the writing.  As far as this novel goes, Paris cannot hold a candle to Athens.

 

Sophie may be away from the dictatorship, but the revolution is still a part of her quotidian existence.  It is through Sophie’s absence from Greece that Bakopoulos is able to focus on how a person can be homesick not only for a family but for a country, even for a nation in political turmoil.  Bakopoulos shows Sophie’s deep longing for home, a sentiment that only grows as the years go by.

 

Perhaps Sophie is less of a revolutionary in Paris, but only because she is not directly involved in the resistance.  Sophie, though, soon becomes a revolutionary in other, more personal and unexpected ways when she is pregnant and happily unwed.  The traditional Eleni must come to terms with her daughter’s newfound independence.

 

With Sophie’s departure from home, the younger Anna feels lonely.  She turns to her older married lover for comfort, but their relationship is doomed to fail, as all such associations are.  Anna is brooding and moody much of the time.  The decision to rebel comes too abruptly in her case.  It is almost as if she thinks protesting the junta is the ultimate way to stick it to everyone in her life.  I felt Bakoupoulos should have provided more allusions to Anna’s ultimate path.  However, in some cases, it is only one event or even one split second that prompts a person to resist.  But it feels wrong for Anna.  Her resistance almost gets her killed.

 

When The Green Shore ends, the military is still in power, although the last days of the junta are near.  Bakopoulos shows us that, regardless of revolution, life still goes on.  Lovers marry.  Women give birth.  Children grow.  The elderly die.  These are a fact of life and do not change based on political leanings or whims.

 

Natalie is the new Bakopoulos to watch.  Good writing or a rebellious spirit—sometimes it just runs in the family.

 

The Green Shore comes out June 5.  Bakopoulos will sign copies of her novel and do a reading from the book at Lemuria Books in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 27, 2012.

 

The version I read was an Advance Reader’s Edition.