For those of us who consider the appearance of a new novel by Adam Haslett the equivalent of getting a new gospel, the authorial voice in "Mothers and Sons" (Little, Brown) is both familiar and strange. Nothing in its contents comes as a surprise except a certain clutter in the narration.
No one's happy, of course, but comedy, even the blackest, is not just absent but feels dismissed. This from a writer whose first novel, "Union Atlantic" features a Fourth of July party gone terribly wrong that's one of the great comedy sequences in present-day fiction.
Even that novel's successor, "Imagine Me Gone," still Haslett's best work, told its sad story in the words of a cast of characters whose observations were not without a certain satanic wit. "Mothers and Sons," whose very title augurs deep meanings, is cheerless, as by its own terms it must be. This is heavy stuff further weighted down in the telling.
Reading it, I often thought of Tolstoy's famous if still puzzling opening line of "Anna Karenina," "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." In the same way the reader responds to that with a healthy "but is that true," Haslett gives us families who are unhappy in ways that feel uncomfortably close. It's a novel that investigates the thin filament between truth and lies and who gets to be the judge.
Truth and consequences
Haslett's genius for something like ventriloquism in putting words into his characters' mouths here restricts itself to two points of view. Peter Fischer, the son, addresses the reader in the first person, while Haslett narrates the story of his mother, Ann, in the third. It's emblematic of the estrangement at the heart of the story.
Ann, who has left a calling as an Episcopal priest, now leads the proceedings at Verititas, a meditation retreat for women. A late-life lesbian, she shares as best she can the partnership of Clare, for whom she left her husband, a man stalked by the homosexuality of others.
Peter Fischer is a gay lawyer specializing in asylum cases, where dauntingly heavy caseloads mostly distract him from a hollowness associated with but not caused by his father's death-bed confession —a quarter-century earlier— that he once attacked another man for coming on to him, physically touching him in the process. Peter's primary diversion is casual sex. He summons Cliff in moments of emotional need and then runs from him when telltale signs of real connection begin to appear.
His circumscribed world is rocked by Vasel Marku, a gay asylum-seeker from Albania who somehow hooks Peter's sympathy, a notch above the empathy he has with other clients. An out gay man, Peter has previously avoided representing gay men, and here he frets that it may be sexual attraction that has prompted him to aid Vasel, when in fact the attraction is to something much deeper.
In the first of several prologues, one for each of the novel's four sections, the reader learns that for Peter the entire story is driven by his adolescent attachment to Jared Harlan, a handsome young man whose own sexuality remains indeterminate despite the strangling degree it, whichever it is, holds Peter in a fateful thrall. At first, all the reader knows is that Jared has sped away from Peter in flight from danger. What actually happened is only gradually, painfully revealed, the novel's motive whodunnit.
Gay male readers will instinctively recognize both the power of Peter's attraction, which throughout the rest of the novel he calls his "wanting," and the coolness of Jared's response that fuels it. Some of Haslett's most compelling writing in the novel addresses Peter's fatal attraction to a deadly handsome boy who just might not care about anything but his indulgence in a charged scene that gives him a selfish pleasure.
But the novel's real pivot, its true north, comes when Ann comforts her distraught son, convinced of his guilt, reflexively calling him blameless. Peter, not mother, knows best, or better, and his much later encounter with Jared's mother, who has understood the underlying dynamics all along, underscores the difference between the two mothers, even if it finds Haslett at his least convincing.
Too much information
One of the signal strengths of Haslett's work until now has been its fierce concentration, the way every word has mattered, every sentence has had its specific torque. Oddly, in "Mothers and Sons" he clutters his own path. Scarcely a noun lacks an adjective or an adjective its adverb. Describing every step across a room in a non-consequential passage only slows the narrative. Cumulatively, the profusion of detail feels like make-weight.
The only character who aggressively "speaks his truth" is Peter, who increasingly finds he is a poor judge of it. He "speaks" in sentence fragments that clot in the reader's ear. Sentence after sentence begins with a dependent clause or, more usually, a conjunction. Together these tics of personality produce more confusion than is already at the core of Peter's fraught thinking.
Things go marginally better in Ann's story. Haslett invokes her "banked desire" in her attraction to yet another woman, and near the end of the novel makes the salient observation that Ann had protected Peter "from the wilds of his heart."
Intimacy without intimacy
Peter comes to see that his investment in his clients' dire situations is his stab at "intimacy without intimacy." That could stand as a motto for the novel as a whole. Haslett is adroit at shifting time frames, sometimes within a paragraph, like casino-level card-shuffling. But like so much else, that interferes with the story-telling.
"Mothers and Sons" emerges a gumbo of themes manifestly worth investigating but in the end slighted by their very profusion. Haslett makes a welcome exploration of the sinister power of human beauty: looks-ism at its most destructive. And there are several plot strands that point to the idea of the "sins" of the fathers being visited on later generations. Underlying psychological currents lose some of their force in Peter's —and, more, Haslett's— tireless psychologizing.
Hanging over it all for the reader is a nagging feeling that, this go-around, the author is describing a book more than writing it. That's certainly the way the relatively few "sex scenes" play out, told more than enacted.
That said, in the place of high-minded reflections on desire and its discontents, here Haslett, like his protagonist, focuses on the "wanting," a plainer expression of the forces that consume all his characters than anything hiding in philosophy. It's the family secrets that bind the characters in profoundly uneasy relationships. Peter and Ann are not the only mothers and sons crowding this book, just the most stuck ones.
'Mothers and Sons' by Adam Haslett, Little, Brown and Company, 334 pages, $29. www.littlebrown.com
www.adamhaslett.net
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