Recent Reviews
Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett
I can’t say that Imagi e Me Go e by Adam Haslett is an enjoyable read. It is not. And there are certain aspects I wish he wrote differently. However, his novel provides an important contribution to the understanding of mental illness. He doesn’t criticize or complement his characters. He simply gives empathic and eloquent voices to one family’s pain and suffering as they cope with an illness that is not understood or curable.
The novel follows the slow devolution of a family wrestling with the effects of mental illness on two family members. Both parents - John and Margaret - and the three kids - Michael, Celia, and Alec - take turns narrating the story, which adds to the story’s impressiveness. When Margaret and John are young, engaged, and living in England, John lands in a mental hospital. Though the psychiatrist warns Margaret about John’s clinical depression, she does not hesitate to marry him. She loves him. They move to the United States and begin their life together and John’s mental state stabilizes.
Soon after their move, Margaret and John have children, their finances are strained, and sometimes John cannot get up off the couch. Margaret carries the weight of the family responsibilities. The three kids suffer as they witness their parents’ frequent fights and their father’s mental diminishment. When John falls into a deep depression, his family tries to reach him, but their efforts are futile.
When Michael, the eldest son, takes over as narrator, it becomes clear that there is something quite different about him. No question he is intellectually gifted, but there is a neediness, incoherence, and manic element to his narration. Michael’s mother and siblings remain loyal and steadfast. Margaret understands her son and yet she cannot save him from himself. Margaret remembers Michael being different from the day of his birth.
Michael’s family and a few close friends understand his misfiring mind. Their loyalty and devotion to Michael, given his difficult personality, is impressive. His obsession with slavery and oppression exhausts those around him. Michael moves from rabbit hole to rabbit hole, desperate but unsuccessful in establishing relationships. Michael says, “People don’t want to be loved the way I love them. They get suffocated. It isn’t their fault. But it isn’t mine either.”
Michael’s family is willing to do most anything for him. And yet Michael’s mental illness penetrates their emotional and financial lives. Michael’s siblings, Celia and Alec, counsel him, comfort him, and try to provide him the hope he needs to keep living. Even as Celia and Alec live their own lives, Michael’s mental state haunts the entire family as they all struggle and suffer.
Chosen as a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award Long List, Adam Haslett's book successfully tackles this difficult subject with compassion and insight. This is not a book about dysfunctional family dynamics. This is a book about illness: mental illness and its debilitating effects on the afflicted and those who support and love them.
this is my daughter by Roxana Robinson
Though Roxanna Robinson’s book This is My Daughter is not as tightly constructed as her brilliant novel Cost, I believe Robinson is one of the most psychologically astute writers on the subject of family dynamics.
In this novel, Robinson explores the emotional fallout of divorce, especially on children. Emma Goodwin and Peter Chatfield live in the fast moving, well-to-do world of New York City. Their first marriages have ended and they begin to date. Though Emma and Peter seem to possess only superficial understandings of their prior marriages, Robinson provides her readers insight into their early lives and backgrounds.
Their relationship proceeds with ease except for the tension created by the interactions between their daughters. Emma’s daughter Tess is only 3, but Peter’s daughter Amanda is 8 and already troubled. Peter and Emma eventually marry and Amanda’s bossiness escalates to full bullying. Emma observes Amanda belittling Tess and finds it difficult to manage her feelings of resentment even though she knows she should. Emma’s own guilt about divorcing Tess’ father makes her vigilant in meeting Tess’ every need. Meanwhile, Peter is embarrassed and ashamed by his daughter’s behavior and yet requires her to spend summer after summer, holiday after holiday, with Emma and Tess. Peter cannot see his daughter for who she is: an angry, needy, traumatized child of divorce in need of thoughtful and mature parenting.
Roxana Robinson shares the inner thoughts of her characters as they reflect on this family predicament. With great empathy, Robinson conveys the emotional struggle within each of these characters. There is no simple solution for complex family dynamics, especially when the children just want life to return to the familiar pre-divorce routines.
The first two sections of the book could have been better edited, but the last third of the book crescendos to a compelling end, brought on by a crisis. Peter and Emma’s desperation to create a new family unit blinds them to the individual needs of their daughters. Their divorces leave a trail of emotional debris that they never say and never attempted to clean up. Amanda especially needs to be comforted and counseled. She needs love and support from Peter and Emma, not judgment and anger. Peter’s own narcissistic needs make him late to this acknowledgement, but he does arrive and actually begins to see his daughter with greater clarity. The good news is that Peter and Emma both reflect on their prior decisions and offer each other insight about their behaviors. It is not as if this family lives happily ever, but it feels that they will move forward with more understanding about themselves and each other. Really, what more can you ask for?
Unravelling by Elizabeth Graver
Elizabeth Graver’s 1977 novel, Unravelling, is intense, raw, sensual, and psychologically astute. Set in the 1820’s in rural New Hampshire, this book is one of the best coming-of-age stories I have read. Graver penetrates the complex inner lives of her characters and imbues them with words and deeds that impart insight and inspire empathy.
Aimee Slater, an older woman, narrates the novel. She tells a mesmerizing tale of how she came to live in a hunting shack on the edge of her parents’ property with limited family contact and minimal social interaction.
As a young girl Aimee lives and works on her family’s farm. Though her family experiences many hardships, Aimee’s relationship with her parents and siblings is positive. Aimee is perceptive, precocious, intuitive, and intelligent. But when she moves into adolescence and begins to have her own opinions, Aimee’s mother withholds her love and her father harshens his tone. Aimee begins to observe the various ways people navigate their feelings. She wonder about her mother’s relationship with her father, “What did she know of the man she lived with? Was he a gentle man with sudden, rare spinnings into rage, or an angry man who mostly held himself in check?”
Aimee and her brother Jeremiah are close in age and spend a lot of time together. As they begin adolescence, the siblings have a sexual encounter in the hayloft of their family’s barn. It is consensual, childlike, brief, and singular. Shame and embarrassment infiltrate their lives and they are never quite the same. In a different era, they might have gone to therapy or talked with a religious figure, but confusion corrodes their relationship. For relief, Aimee decides to leave the farm to work in the mills of Massachusetts. Without understanding Aimee’s motivations, her parents feel rejected and emotionally turn away.
Many tragedies befall Aimee and at age 17 she copes as best she can. She works hard in the mills and lives in a boarding house in Lowell. When she becomes pregnant, Aimee has no one but her family. Instead of sending love and support, her mother sends her a letter filled with judgment and wrath. The letter ends, “Do Not Come Home.” Rather than provide unconditional love, Aimee’s mother’s provincialism and religious superstitions determine her actions. After giving birth, Aimee returns to New Hampshire and does not lie or apologize. And like Hester Pryne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Aimee is shunned. Yet, as the decades pass, she creates her own little family with a disabled man from the town and a traumatized girl named Plumey. Reading about the unraveling of Aimee’s life haunts me. Yet Aimee’s accumulated insight and compassion over the years allow her to understand herself and attempt to reconcile with her elderly mother. As Aimee says of Plumey, “It is the deepest mystery what goes on inside anybody’s head.” Elizabeth Graver succeeds in delving into her characters’ heads and writing a novel filled with emotional and psychological nuance and poignancy.
