BUG HOLLOW, by Michelle Huneven
Entering the lives of the Samuelson family in 1970s Altadena, Calif., feels like getting into a warm bath. Michelle Huneven’s sixth novel, “Bug Hollow,” instantly seduces even the most news-addled reader with its lovely, lucid prose, its spot-on period details (those pay phones!) and superb gift for description — of a sprawling cast led by a supportive engineer father, Phil, and a prickly elementary-school teacher mother, Sibyl; and especially of California’s many wildly differing landscapes.
The Samuelsons’ simple suburban world turns upside down when 17-year-old Ellis, the sunny eldest child of three, goes camping with his friends outside Santa Cruz and doesn’t bother to come back. “Some girl has snagged Ellis,” Sibyl frets. “Good for her,” Phil says, and the marital tension is established: Dad is chill and Mom is a control freak.
Days turn into weeks with little contact from Ellis and a lot of panicking from Sibyl (is her son dropping out of college before he’s even begun?), until the family tracks him to a rundown house in the Santa Cruz Mountains called Bug Hollow, the part commune, part crash pad where Ellis has moved in with Julia, an artsy, beautiful girl he met on the beach.
The young couple’s joy brings back all the feels, as the kids say today — the aha-ness of falling in love for the first time — but Sibyl isn’t having any of it, and brings her boy home to spend his last pre-college week with his family. As Ellis’s youngest sister, Sally, the precocious and dryly hilarious narrator of the first chapter, puts it: “Julia made a little speech about how she didn’t want our parents to be mad at her because she and Ellis truly loved one another and would be together forever, and she hoped to love and be loved by his family, too.” My eyes filled.
It is not a spoiler to reveal that by Page 21, Ellis is dead: accidentally drowned in a quarry five days into his freshman year at Ole Miss. Phil goes down to Mississippi and returns with “a box wrapped in shiny ivory paper and tied with a thick purple ribbon,” Sally narrates, thinking “it was probably candy, and for everyone, another big assortment of chocolates he’d bought at the airport.” In fact, it is Ellis’s remains. The lack of sentimentality surrounding this death is as shocking to the reader as it is to this repressed and soon-to-be fractured family who will carry this dead child along with them emotionally for generations.
The novel evolves from its innocent opening into something more intriguing. Nothing (aside from the book jacket summary) prepares the reader for the five-decade international saga that unfolds in 10 discrete but interwoven chapters, each narrated by a different member of the Samuelson family or its widening circle. Formally, the result is something like a narrative love child of Alice Munro’s novelistic short stories and Elizabeth Strout’s novels of interconnected short stories.
Julia turns out to be pregnant with Ellis’s daughter, whom she offers to the Samuelsons to adopt while remaining a part of their lives for decades. Viewed from the perspectives of her husband and (now three) daughters over time, Sibyl is revealed as a bitter and biting alcoholic, a gifted and giving teacher but a lousy, indifferent mother. (“God, Katie, roll down your window,” she tells her eldest daughter, ruining a rare fun day together at a museum. “You stink. Why don’t you use deodorant?”) Later chapters witness Sally and her adopted sister, Eva, becoming a bonded pair, filling the vacuum of their own nurturing by mothering each other.
Other chapters deviate so far from the family that they risk losing the novel’s focus. Still, as diversions go, these are rich with specifics, fresh and moving. When Phil travels to Saudi Arabia on a work assignment, our attention is stolen by the woman he has an affair with, the exotic Yvette, a talented French architect who feels bored and professionally stifled by her charismatic older husband, Claude. And toward the end, the aging Mrs. Wright, a wealthy widow and haughty former principal at Sibyl’s school, falls in love with her younger, Jamaican female caretaker, Linda, who happens to need a green card. When she proposes to Linda, Mrs. Wright reflects: “My old parts dried up long ago. … I don’t care about sex. But who knew, in my old age, love would come again?”
Huneven is exceptionally generous with all of her characters — even the hard-to-bear Sibyl — and remains a compassionate guide through the secrets and lies, betrayals and chance encounters, losses and disappointments that buffet this broken and remade family over time. While the ending might be a little too honeyed, I remained hopelessly, gratefully under this novel’s spell.
BUG HOLLOW | By Michelle Huneven | Penguin Press | 274 pp. | $29
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