It’s very strange, but this is the second novel I’ve read recently with a trans-Atlantic setting that involves a family and that has depression as a major theme. The other one was James Wood’s ‘Upstate’, which came out in 2018 and which I reviewed on 30 November of that year. The other thing that the books have in common is trains, since both of them contain scenes that involve travel from New York to places north. In Wood’s book it is to Saratoga Springs, a town in the north of the state of New York. In Haslett’s book Alec travels by train on one occasion from the city of New York, where he works as a journalist, to Boston.
Another thing links both books: they do their jobs well. (If a novel can have a “job” to do, that is, which is something that is highly questionable; art should not be roped in to carry out the same sort of function as a piece of journalism or a book of nonfiction.) In the case of Haslett’s book however the scope is far wider and the effect of the work is commensurately larger.
Haslett looks at the fortunes of a family that spends most of its time in America and is, therefore, a middle-class American family. In his review he takes in the life of the parents, John and Margaret, and John’s diagnosis before they are married. The book starts with the death of Michael, their eldest son, and then goes into reverse, chronologically speaking, but by the time you get to the end of the first section of the book (there are three sections in total) John has suicided. The book is otherwise broken into sections that jump by a number of years each time, which carries you along the family story in increments, and each section is focalised through a different member of the family.
Suspense is created by the presence of signal events such as, on one occasion, the news that Celia, John and Margaret’s daughter, delivers to Alec, her brother, about her pregnancy. There is also the troubling presence of money worries, especially as it affects Margaret, who has to go to work once John is dead. There is for instance the problem of Michael’s debts. This burden on Margaret is exacerbated by the existence of medical bills (the US has a strange and almost unique system of funding for medicine, and so it is hard to understand how this kind of thing can weigh down an ordinary family, but it can in that country). Alec, who is gay, tries to help her to manage her finances but the problem of money remains throughout the book as a series of important plot devices.
What is so great about this book however, in addition to the long and concentrated glance it dedicates to mental illness, is the writing. Some of the sentences are mesmerizingly long, like something that Proust would have written. Some of the more complex inventions are overly difficult, on the other hand, making it hard to understand what the writer has in mind. Overall, the emphasis on style gives the book a gravitas that the author aspires to achieve. The writing often functions like good jewellery does: the complex sentences and hard concepts work like settings to hold up the stones, which are the characters and the scenes, allowing you to see things that would otherwise have remained hidden.
And even though this is a fairly routine family saga the suspense never wanes, right up to the glorious ending, which takes you a bit by surprise, and is contained in one of Margaret’s narrative sections. You want to know how things turn out. You care about these characters. The things that are important to them, and their opinions on the world, are relevant. I think this constitutes the most substantial achievement of this book.
The other thing that is a relief is the subdued tone that is used to convey the drama the book contains. As in another recent novel (‘Less’ by Andrew Sean Greer, reviewed here on 29 December of last year) small events are given their due importance, so it is possible for Haslett to investigate nuance and complicated things. The big, emotive punctuation marks that are deployed in the plots of books of genre fiction are replaced by less intrusive but, actually, equally important things. With his long sentences he lifts up the covers on life to examine its interior, and he shines a light on events that are actually quite mundane but that often get ignored out of a misplaced sense of propriety or because of a feeling that they are not important enough for general regard.
The character of Michael is especially interesting. In some of the sections that are focalised through him we are given writings that he makes in response to certain circumstances. The section that takes in the family’s journey from the US to England by boat when Michael is a teenager is a comic triumph. It elegantly demonstrates his precocity and underscores the importance to him of the major theme that will follow him through his life: his interest in slavery. Another section is narrated with the same kind of verve and love of words as the passages that are narrated by Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’ (1955).
Halsett uses Michael’s obsession also to interrogate the nature of the postcolonial understanding of the world. Often you get Alec or Celia cogitating on Michael and giving their own opinions of his attitude to his particular hobby-horse, and this kind of wry take on what in many circles lies beyond the possibility of criticism serves to give depth to the narrative and to help draw Michael in more suggestive strokes than would otherwise have been possible.
This is an intelligent novel by an accomplished writer.
Another thing links both books: they do their jobs well. (If a novel can have a “job” to do, that is, which is something that is highly questionable; art should not be roped in to carry out the same sort of function as a piece of journalism or a book of nonfiction.) In the case of Haslett’s book however the scope is far wider and the effect of the work is commensurately larger.
Haslett looks at the fortunes of a family that spends most of its time in America and is, therefore, a middle-class American family. In his review he takes in the life of the parents, John and Margaret, and John’s diagnosis before they are married. The book starts with the death of Michael, their eldest son, and then goes into reverse, chronologically speaking, but by the time you get to the end of the first section of the book (there are three sections in total) John has suicided. The book is otherwise broken into sections that jump by a number of years each time, which carries you along the family story in increments, and each section is focalised through a different member of the family.
Suspense is created by the presence of signal events such as, on one occasion, the news that Celia, John and Margaret’s daughter, delivers to Alec, her brother, about her pregnancy. There is also the troubling presence of money worries, especially as it affects Margaret, who has to go to work once John is dead. There is for instance the problem of Michael’s debts. This burden on Margaret is exacerbated by the existence of medical bills (the US has a strange and almost unique system of funding for medicine, and so it is hard to understand how this kind of thing can weigh down an ordinary family, but it can in that country). Alec, who is gay, tries to help her to manage her finances but the problem of money remains throughout the book as a series of important plot devices.
What is so great about this book however, in addition to the long and concentrated glance it dedicates to mental illness, is the writing. Some of the sentences are mesmerizingly long, like something that Proust would have written. Some of the more complex inventions are overly difficult, on the other hand, making it hard to understand what the writer has in mind. Overall, the emphasis on style gives the book a gravitas that the author aspires to achieve. The writing often functions like good jewellery does: the complex sentences and hard concepts work like settings to hold up the stones, which are the characters and the scenes, allowing you to see things that would otherwise have remained hidden.
And even though this is a fairly routine family saga the suspense never wanes, right up to the glorious ending, which takes you a bit by surprise, and is contained in one of Margaret’s narrative sections. You want to know how things turn out. You care about these characters. The things that are important to them, and their opinions on the world, are relevant. I think this constitutes the most substantial achievement of this book.
The other thing that is a relief is the subdued tone that is used to convey the drama the book contains. As in another recent novel (‘Less’ by Andrew Sean Greer, reviewed here on 29 December of last year) small events are given their due importance, so it is possible for Haslett to investigate nuance and complicated things. The big, emotive punctuation marks that are deployed in the plots of books of genre fiction are replaced by less intrusive but, actually, equally important things. With his long sentences he lifts up the covers on life to examine its interior, and he shines a light on events that are actually quite mundane but that often get ignored out of a misplaced sense of propriety or because of a feeling that they are not important enough for general regard.
The character of Michael is especially interesting. In some of the sections that are focalised through him we are given writings that he makes in response to certain circumstances. The section that takes in the family’s journey from the US to England by boat when Michael is a teenager is a comic triumph. It elegantly demonstrates his precocity and underscores the importance to him of the major theme that will follow him through his life: his interest in slavery. Another section is narrated with the same kind of verve and love of words as the passages that are narrated by Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’ (1955).
Halsett uses Michael’s obsession also to interrogate the nature of the postcolonial understanding of the world. Often you get Alec or Celia cogitating on Michael and giving their own opinions of his attitude to his particular hobby-horse, and this kind of wry take on what in many circles lies beyond the possibility of criticism serves to give depth to the narrative and to help draw Michael in more suggestive strokes than would otherwise have been possible.
This is an intelligent novel by an accomplished writer.
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