Recent Reviews
Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill
Eugene O’Neill won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously for his powerful play Long Day’s Journey Into Night. First performed in the United States in 1956, the play is considered O’Neill’s finest and most autobiographical work. Both critics and audiences praised the play for its raw emotional content.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night takes place in the Connecticut home of the Tyrone family over a day in 1912. Tyrone is the last name O’Neill gave to this family that replicated his own. He retained the names of his father, James, his mother, Mary, and his brother, Jamie Jr., but changed his name in the play to Edmund. When the story begins, the family members are conversing happily and lovingly. Yet two upsetting pieces of information regarding Mary, the mother, and Edmund, the youngest son, change the tone of the family discourse. Instead of tenderness and sympathy, there are accusations and recriminations. Mary Tyrone states, “We’ve loved each other! We always will! Let’s remember only that, and not try to understand what we cannot understand, or help things that cannot be helped-the things life has done to us we cannot excuse or explain.”
As the light of day fades into the darkness of night, each family member articulates grievances, anger, and blame for the family’s fate. Unfortunately, this family does not believe in verbal restraint. The origins of this dysfunctional dynamic are complex, though a few clues are provided. In a different era, therapy might have helped the situation.
Exacerbating the situation, James Tyrone and his two grown sons are alcoholics, and Mary Tyrone struggles with morphine addiction. Like all people, each character has charming characteristics but also fatal flaws. Though not uplifting, the dialogue is immersive and enriched by references to literature, religion and theater. Like Arthur Miller’s Death of Salesman, this book echoes the first family of literature, Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel.
So, why would one want to spend a couple of hours with four dysfunctional individuals? Because the playwriting is excellent and insightful about the human condition. O’Neill illuminates how unprocessed emotions can shape the course of lives without the person’s knowledge. The play moves forward while pulling readers into the past to find clues as to why the characters behave the way they do. Great literature embodies empathy and understanding, and O’Neill is a skilled practitioner.
Cost by Roxana Robinson
I recently reread Roxana Robinson’s 2008 novel Cost. If you haven’t read this book, you are in for a treat. Not because the story is happy—it is not—but because Robinson is a gifted connoisseur of deconstructing family dynamics. Her elegant prose penetrates the emotional interiority of her characters with precision and empathy.
On one level, the story is about a 22-year-old man named Jack Lambert, who is a heroin addict. On another level, the story is about how a destructive family dynamic is passed from generation to generation, resulting in one family member unconsciously being assigned to carry the burden of the damage.
Jack’s parents, Julia and Wendell, are divorced. When Jack’s older brother Steven tells his parents that Jack’s drug use has become dangerous, they each choose denial, but soon an intervention is arranged. Jack’s parents, brother, grandparents, and aunt gather at Julia’s summer home in Maine. When the addiction counselor asks them to write about what they love about Jack, they all bristle. “Love is not a word their family used.” Though the family members have pleasant public personas, their past anger, hurt and distrust lurks when they are together.
Robinson writes about Jack’s heroin addiction with intimacy and captures the obsessive thoughts of an addict looking for his next fix. She also depicts the emotional cost to Jack’s family as his stealing and lying intrude on their lives. Their feelings alternate between grief and guilt to fury and rage. This theme propels much of the plot.
(Spoiler Alert) However, the more compelling theme is the family dynamic that has pathologized Jack since childhood. “He was always a wild center of the storm.” Jack carried the burden of his parents’ and even his grandparents’ choices. The ambiguity of Jack’s paternity was never discussed. It was unconsciously known. Jack’s father Wendell says at the intervention, “I think I was too hard on Jack.” And then later, “It’s like hearing that he is Chinese or that he’s not my son.” Wendell knows and doesn’t know, and Julia is not sure.
This powerful novel about the scourge of heroin addiction and the scourge of toxic family dynamics long ignored is heartbreaking. Robinson’s ability to illuminate each family member’s past and present interiority is extraordinary. Jack pays a painful price for his addiction as does his family. Eventually, there can be a cost of not dealing with the past. 5/5
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ozawa
The Housekeeper and the Professor is a touching and original novel by Yoko Ogawa that embodies the quiet sway of love.
The novel’s premise is unique. A brilliant math professor suffers a traumatic brain injury which has damaged his short-term memory. He can only remember 80 minutes at a time. The Professor’s sister-in-law hires a housekeeper with problems of her own. Luckily, the Professor is fond of the Housekeeper’s ten-year-old son, whom he named Root (as in square Root.) And every 80 minutes, he needs to be reintroduced to them. After school each day, Root walks to the Professor’s house, and the Professor helps Root with his math problems. They also discussed Japanese baseball as long as the players and the games occurred before the accident.
Each day, the Professor works diligently on mathematical formulas despite the limitations of his short-term memory. He puts sticky notes on his clothes to remind himself of mundane tasks or recent progress in solving an equation. The Professor sees the world in patterns and numbers. When he realizes that the sum of his Housekeeper’s birthday (220) factors and those on the back of his prized watch (284) are ‘amicable numbers,’ he ascribes deep meaning and connection. And though the Housekeeper didn’t finish her schooling, her intellectual and emotional curiosity is evident as she cares for the Professor and his unique situation.
Over time, the emotional capacity of each member of this triangle expands exponentially. This beautiful story reveals quiet characters who offer love, acceptance and compassion to one another. 4/5
