Three novels in, a writer is running low on secrets. We know for sure, now, what Adam Haslett likes to put down on the page. Dead men (usually fathers). Widows (usually nature-loving). The children left behind (usually siblings, one of whom grows up a gay man). Unequal gay relationships, in which one partner provides sexual favors but yearns to be looked at and kissed. Houses as sites of memory and complicated belonging. Pity, shame and loneliness. Depression or anxiety figured as a beast, lurking, prowling and pouncing.
Most important, we know that Haslett is a writer in thrall to retrospect. In his first novel, “Union Atlantic,” a prologue informs us that Doug, a macho banker taking insane risks in the early noughts, has been warped by his complicity in a military-civilian disaster in 1988. In “Imagine Me Gone,” a prologue informs us that the history of a family will span the death of its eldest son.
And in Haslett’s new novel, “Mothers and Sons,” a prologue informs us that its protagonist, Peter Fischer, is haunted by a long-ago event involving a boy called Jared and Peter’s mother, Ann. Even this summary understates the extent to which Haslett’s stories are mainly back story. Everywhere you look, his characters are troubled by their pasts, forever unraveling toward the present.
In his first two novels, Haslett divided his attention among multiple characters, seeming to share with Jonathan Franzen (with whom he studied, and to whom he is often compared) a conviction that family and society are the proper engines of the contemporary novel. But both times, the result was a thinness of texture: the reader seeing too many aspects of too many lives too briefly.
In “Mothers and Sons,” Haslett has wisely concentrated his gifts, choosing to give only the perspectives of Peter and Ann, who have been estranged for many years. He has also embraced his predilection for back story by making the narratives people tell to explain themselves the subject of the novel itself.
Peter is a New York asylum lawyer, his job to help clients convincingly describe the conditions that forced them to flee their home countries — “there’s a lot of violence,” he generalizes at one point — and that prevent them from safely returning. Haslett, who has a law degree, is himself very convincing in his depiction of this work, and has Peter reflect on its strangeness, “projecting myself into one life after another, intimacy without intimacy.”
We come to see that this describes not only Peter’s job, but his denuded way of existence. He is gay, and subsists on casual sex, but has avoided cases relating to sexual orientation until he is forced to take on Vasel Marku, a 21-year-old Albanian. Vasel’s story — he was nearly murdered by members of his family after being discovered with another boy — stirs destabilizing memories of Peter’s own teenage years. Intimacy has finally breached his defenses, and soon he is headed for crisis.
Meanwhile, Ann is living in Vermont at the remote women’s retreat she co-founded with her partner, Clare. She is a former priest and a widow — also an escapee, from the roles of wife and heterosexual — who has long been praised for her openness to others. Listening, with patience and restraint, to women speaking about their lives is the retreat’s specialty. (It’s a tribute to Haslett’s careful, calm prose that Ann comes across as dignified and believable, rather than as an object ripe for satire or debunking.)
Peter needs Ann. The question is how, despite their superficial similarity, this mother and son came to be parted, and why Ann has been unable to respond to Peter’s obvious angst. (Their experience is shadowed by other mother-son relationships, including, from outside the book, the lesbian mother and gay son in Alan Hollinghurst’s recent “Our Evenings.”)
Of course, it is the gradually uncovered story of what happened with Jared — especially on the night obliquely described at the beginning — that will provide the answer. Or many answers. Because the novel is really about the ways that our self-explanations — so often self-justifications — fail to encompass our lives. How misleading they can be, and confining. How they can distance and divide us, as much as provide common ground.
“It’s what I’ve spent my adult life doing,” Peter thinks. “Whittling stories down into patterns the law can see. … And yet in that shaping, what violence is done to the fullness of an actual life.”
“Mothers and Sons” is Haslett’s best novel. By limiting his area of inquiry, he achieves new levels of moral depth and narrative push. But he has not escaped old problems; in some ways he has entrenched them. The past remains an accurate predictor of future ills, leading characters to banal and often sentimental therapeutic realizations (stated, one feels, in Haslett’s voice rather than their own). In this book, we get “what a waste a closed heart is” and “how full of shame it is to be lonely,” among others.
Indeed the quantity of remembered events, all of them in the service of Haslett’s main themes, undermines his argument for our bursting multifariousness: everything fits, too neatly and tightly. And it means that we tend to be told about the lives and personalities of characters, rather than learning from their actions and speech. Constantly looking backward, we lose the pleasure, and the interest, of living with them in the moment.
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