The Barnes & Noble Review
Forget about crumbling farmhouses, hidden debt. Among the most complicated legacies the dead leave us are their secrets. A wrecking ball of this sort swings through Siri Hustvedt's brilliant novel The Sorrows of an American, the tale of Erik and Inga Davidsen, two New Yorkbased Norwegian Americans. After the death of their father they find what appears to be record of his involvement in a murder. "Dear Lars," reads a note in his papers, "I know you will never ever say nothing about what happened. We swore it on the BIBLE. It can't matter now she's in heaven or to the ones in earth. I believe in your promise. Lisa."
No one in the Davidsen family knows who Lisa is, not even Lars's widow. By profession Lars's children -- Erik, a psychologist, and Inga, a cultural critic -- do not let loose ends lie. "I've always felt that there were things Pappa kept from Mamma and us," Inga tells her brother, "especially about his childhood." What unspools from here is a moving quest for truth in the murky waters of familial memory. Inga and Erik become detectives within their own family, tracking down leads to distant relatives, searching for hints of what their father may have hidden in plain view.
Had Hustvedt stopped here, she would have put on a merely solid performance, but she stuffs The Sorrows of an American full of numerous subplots that allow for a powerful meditation on truth and memory, the inscrutability of the past, American amnesia, and the question of how much experience can be recorded. Unlike so many broad-scope social epics of recent note, Sorrows of an American says more through ambiguity than information. "Words create the anatomy of the story," says Erik, who listens to them all day long. "But within that story there are openings that can't be closed."
To read this novel is to watch Hustvedt's characters try to close those Pandora's boxes anyway -- though Erik's prediction ultimately seems to hold. Inga's late husband, the famous novelist Max Blaustein, has a biographer and a tabloid journalist chasing his ghost. Both of them stalk Inga at close distance -- the biographer, hoping for a whiff of Max's genius, the journalist creepily insinuating that there were things about her late husband that Inga did not know.
During the publication of Hustvedt's previous novel, What I Loved, tabloid journalists played a similar literalist number on her, reading into the plot of that book a veiled story about her private life with her real-life husband, novelist Paul Auster. There are, it is hard not to notice, similarities between Blaustein and Auster here, but it's also blindingly obvious these are red herrings. On some level, it feels like Hustvedt has created this frisson of autobiography in The Sorrows of an American to coax some readers to the peephole -- only to reflect back to them their own prurient gape.
On one concrete level, however, the novel owes a heavy debt to real life. Hustvedt has spliced sections of her own father's memoir into the text nearly verbatim, assigning them to Lars. She carries this tricky narrative gambit off beautifully, in part because Lars's memoir is so convincingly of its time. "Looking back at our early life," reads one mournful section in his voice, "the most astonishing feature must be how small our house was. A kitchen, living room, and bedroom on the floor came to 476 square feet."
Separated from these dignified, spartan roots by a distance of miles and money, Erik and Inga are adrift in a much airier, de-cultured world -- and this loss creates a grinding, needful anxiety. After his divorce, Erik rents out his downstairs apartment to Miranda, a single African-American mother and her child. He quickly becomes unhealthily obsessed with their comings and goings. But before he can cut himself off, he realizes the woman is also being stalked by an ex-lover, a performance artist who shoots photos of people (and their private spaces) without their knowing.
Hustvedt is a perceptive, eclectic art critic -- her insightful essays on painting are gathered in the wonderful book The Mysteries of the Rectangle -- but her attempt to frame themes by creating fictional artwork feels forced sometimes here. Miranda, the downstairs tenant, exorcises her sorrows in paintings that never quite come to life. This is a surprise. In What I Loved, Hustvedt mined a similar vein with greater success, inventing an entire oeuvre of paintings for one of her characters and then seamlessly braiding it into the story of a family fractured by tragedy.
The Sorrows of an American is far more successful at conjuring the emotional vertigo that overtakes Hustvedt's characters as they try, and fail, to make sense of where they are now -- especially Erik, who narrates the bulk of the book. During the day, his patients' confessions echo in his head. At night, a new set of voices take over, denying him any reprieve. "Sometimes, as I felt myself finally drift toward sleep," he says, "I would hear my father cough, a sound as unmistakable as his voice, and it would jolt me back to consciousness."
We are the stories we tell, as Joyce Carol Oates's famous tale instructed. What happens, though, when these stories erode with time? This rupture with the past, Hustvedt's novel suggests, forces us to fabricate new self-myths from the people we draw to us, sometimes at great risk. The Sorrows of an American boldly embodies this idea. Conclusions are reached and then obliterated; only by forming new and more relationships do the Davidsens get to the bottom of their most burning questions.
Following them to this piece of familial bitumen, this new bedrock, makes for a good read. The novel flows from one short section to another like water from lock into lock, on its way downstream. Ultimately, this sensation of movement, however, is a trick. Hustvedt's cast always finds new snags, new questions, all sparks of the great Catherine wheel of a question spinning at the heart of this book: Can we ever truly know one another? Once pried open, The Sorrows of an American boldly reminds, this ultimate Pandora's box never gets shut. --John Freeman
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle. He is writing a book on the tyranny of email for Scribner.
