Recent Reviews
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
This poignant novel by Celeste Ng explores the deleterious effects of emotional isolation, especially in a family. James and Marilyn Lee are parents to teenagers, Nathan and Lydia, and their younger sister, Hannah. The parents do their best and still let their three kids down. They are not bad people, just wounded people. Like a forensic psychologist, Celeste Ng pieces together the factors that lead to the death of middle daughter, Lydia. It is a tragic story.
James, a gifted Chinese American student, meets his wife, Marilyn, when he is a young professor at Harvard and Marilyn is one of his undergraduates. They had both grown up as only children, isolated, alone and distant from their own parents. They fall in love, get married and cling to each other on their own emotional island. Marilyn has dreams of becoming a doctor while James seeks acceptance as a respected professor of American history. When James is denied tenure, probably due to his ethnicity, they retreat to a small college town in Ohio.
I feel for the Lee Family and admire Ng’s excavating of their relationships. Though Marilyn and James are bright, their emotional capacities are limited. They lack the skills to help one another. When kids arrive, they simply expand their islands of isolation. Marilyn gives up her dream of becoming a doctor, causing her great pain. The kids feel oppressed by their parents’ yearnings and desires for them. Nathan, the oldest, reminds James of his own isolation as a young person and Lydia the middle daughter becomes the repository of her mother’s thwarted ambitions. Hannah, the youngest daughter, is somewhat neglected. Marilyn and James love their kids, but they can’t connect to who they really are. They offer no message: Be who you are. We love you. The parents are distracted and anxious as they project and transfer their feelings onto Nathan and Lydia. The kids feel their parents’ vulnerabilities and want to protect their parents from the truths about their high school lives. There are plenty of subplots in the book as well as undercurrents of racism and sexism. Ng’s novel provides an excellent exploration of this heartbreaking family dynamic.
The book’s title is Everything I Never Told You, but really it should be - Everything We Never Told Each Other.
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
Most people wish they could "redo" an event in their past. Julian Barnes in his outstanding book, The Sense of an Ending, explores the role of repression and regret and maturation and memory in the evolution of a person. He extols the virtues of refection, while acknowledging the difficulty of the task. When Tony Webster is 17 years old, he attends a boarding school outside of London in the 1950s. When he learns that his good friend Adrian and his former girlfriend Veronica are romantically involved, Tony feels hurt and rejected. He writes a mean and bitter letter mocking their relationship. Even cursing them. He graduates, marries, pursues a career and has a daughter. He thinks little about Adrian and Veronica and that period of his life.
Forty years later Veronica’s mother passes away. The mother’s lawyer notifies Tony that Veronica’s mother has left him a small sum of money and two documents, one of which is his letter. Tony learns of the letter's ramifications in the lives of his former friends. He views the letter he barely remembers writing. He states,” I reread the letter several times. I could scarcely deny its authorship or its ugliness. All I could plead was that I had been its author, then, but was not it author now. Indeed I didn’t recognize that part of myself from which the letter came.” Tony is remorseful on behalf of his younger immature self, “I was just flailing around, trying to find a way to hurt.”
I don’t want to spoil all the twists and turns in Part 2, but the story hinges on why Veronica’s mother possesses Tony’s letter and wills it to him. Tony meets Veronica again and we understand Tony’s view of the events that had transpired before the letter. There is a question lurking in the narrative, Is Tony’s story truthful? Barnes warns us in the first few pages, “…we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.” Now in their 60’s, Veronica says to Tony, "You still don't get it. You never did and you never will." The novel offers a sense of an ending, but not a clear ending. Readers must come to their own conclusions.
Barnes’ brilliantly illuminates the issues of misunderstanding and denial in communication. Memories have motives of their own and feelings can override facts. Human beings can rearrange events to create a parallel narrative that excludes unwanted information and emotions. In this age of twitter posts, I am struck by the importance of considering what we say and do. Impulsive actions often hurt. Humans want to be rational, but when it comes to love, loss, pride and shame, we are captive to our emotions. We can only understand our lives by looking at our pasts; we must attempt to make good choices in the present.
The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman
This beautiful book, The Light Between Oceans, by M.L. Stedman, illustrates how good people make poor choices. Isabel and Tom Sherbourne, a young married couple, are the lighthouse keepers and only inhabitants on Janus Rock, a tiny island off the coast of Western Australia. Isabel feels grief for the loss of her two brothers who died in WWI. Tom feels guilt that he killed enemy soldiers in the same war. Their quiet life on this island offers them solace.
After three miscarriages, Isabel is bereft; Tom wants to make her pain go away. When a towboat with a dead man and a live baby appear on their little island, they care for the infant and soon consider her their daughter. Isabel represses thoughts about the baby’s birth mother while Tom wants to notify the proper authorities. They both have experienced so much loss; they create a narrative that allows them to live with themselves.
They name the little girl Lucy and the family lives peacefully. As the months pass, Isabel suppresses inconvenient questions, while her husband struggles with the morality of their decision. As the baby grows into a young girl, the guilt is too much for Tom. On a trip back to the mainland, he learns the identity of Lucy’s birth mother, Hannah Roennfeldt. Tom sends Hannah a note letting her know her little girl is safe. Soon, the tidy world that Tom and Isabel have constructed falls apart. Events cascade like a waterfall, and all the characters wrestle with what is best for Lucy. Tom and Isabel each experience betrayals and their old demons push into the present.
I admire this heartbreaking novel because Stedman does not create characters that are good or evil. She creates good people who struggle with conflicting emotions and desires. Her book beautifully explores the complexity of human emotion and the role that past pains have in shaping present choices. All the characters suffer and I feel empathy for each of them.
