Books: review

Published on Friday 30 May 2008 17:40

Life mimics art in a year of secrets

THE SORROWS OF AN AMERICAN

Siri Hustvedt

Sceptre, 16.99

FROM the divorced New York psychotherapist who narrates this strange, oblique tale of familial grief to the artist stalked by an ex who sends her photographs in which her eyes have been slashed out, Siri Hustvedt's fourth novel brims with luminous, unknowable characters. Two, however, stand out.

The first is Inga, sister of the psychotherapist Erik. She is a beautiful, intelligent and deeply sensitive American writer, the granddaughter of Norwegian immigrants who suffers from migraines and is grieving the death of her husband, a brilliant cult writer. It's pretty much a spot-on description of Hustvedt herself (minus the grieving). She is also the granddaughter of Norwegian immigrants who grew up in Minnesota, has often spoken of her migraines and she is married to cult New York writer Paul Auster. Though following Hustvedt's last novel, the breathtaking thriller What I Loved, and this follow-up, it's about time we stopped referring to her as Paul Auster's wife.

Though homing in on the likeness between Hustvedt and her creation is only one way into this complex, layered and occasionally infuriating novel, it is impossible to avoid such a tantalising path. This is especially the case when we discover that the second exceptional character in the book, Erik and Inga's father, Lars, is based on Hustvedt's own father. We meet the siblings at the start of what Inga terms "a year of secrets", beginning with the death of Lars and ending with a somewhat anticlimactic discovery about his life (though like all family secrets, it is life-changing for them).

In the meantime, Erik spends lonely evenings in his Brooklyn brownstone, engrossed in his father's old journals that describe his childhood on a Minnesota farm and his time in the US army during the Second World War. "A number of bodies washed ashore during our first night on the beach," Lars writes. "Things had, after all, gone wrong for some on the way in. We were told to leave them be." These moving, spare observations are in fact taken directly from Hustvedt's father's memoir, as she reveals in the acknowledgments.

All this forms just part of the story, however. Woven into this fragmented family saga is the muddle of post 9-11 New York life. There is the cacophony of voices of Erik's patients, their madness and pain providing a thought-provoking backdrop to the siblings' more socially acceptable grief. Hustvedt is interested in America's culture of pathologising, in the point at which the line blurs between reason and madness, and how (and by whom) that distinction is determined.

And there are more strands. Inga is hounded by a journalist intent on publishing letters that will expose her husband. Her teenage daughter can't wipe the image of the collapsing Twin Towers from her mind. Back in Brooklyn, Erik lusts ineffectually after his neighbour, the mysterious artist with the stalker ("a man in the business of stealing appearances"). Incidentally, Hustvedt is very good at assuming a male protagonist voice, as she also did in What I Loved, and imagining the mess of sexual frustration, unarticulated loneliness and weight of responsibility that comes with it.

If The Sorrows Of An American sounds like half a dozen novels rolled into one, well, that's exactly what it is. That's without even mentioning the many passages devoted to ideas, whether the philosophy of Kierkegaard or a denunciation of America's foreign policy. Sometimes, in these instances, Hustvedt's characters tremble under the intellectual weight they carry.

What in the end binds The Sorrows Of An American together, though, are the ideas. This is a book about memory and loss, about how we reconstruct our pasts through our families and how we continue to rewrite them for our present selves. It's also about the gap between what we think we know about someone close to us, and how much more there is that we can never know.

In this context the sense of distance and universality with which Hustvedt has imbued her book – all the way down to its cool, practically academic title – makes perfect sense.