Crooked Little Heart
By Anne Lamott
Pantheon, 326 pages, $24
There is a moment in Anne Lamott’s wry and elegiac new novel, “Crooked Little Heart,” when 13-year-old protagonist Rosie Ferguson stops to assess the sweetly ad hoc group of friends and near-relatives who have come to call her their own: “We’re like some family you’d get at a garage sale.”
Composed of one affectionate yet often-distracted mother, Elizabeth; a kind, vaguely neurotic stepfather, James; Rosie herself, the adolescent daughter of a first marriage; and a host of close friends posed as stand-in uncles and aunts, what the Fergusons are like, in fact, is what so many versions of the new American family are like these days: loving–if at times messily assembled–constellations of mothers and children, stepparents and missing parents, friends and lovers, and all of the companions of those lovers and friends. It is no great secret: Families, even our fictional ones, are not what they used to be.
Like so many of their fictional and real counterparts, the Fergusons are trying hard to form a cohesive whole from a sometimes-fragmented group, to shove together a handful of “life’s little shards” and get on with the business of living. A familiar enough dilemma. But what is less familiar, and what sets “Crooked Little Heart” apart from other portraits of the family in post-Boomer transition, is Lamott’s carefully nuanced exploration of the bits and pieces of domestic life that have not changed.
In focusing on what has stayed steadfast and true, Lamott has given us less a snapshot of the devolved or dysfunctional groups we have perhaps come to expect of tales from the home front and more a story of what is right, if often hard won, about the inner workings of these extended households: a delicate study of the unchangingly fierce and fragile love that exists among family members whether real or borrowed; an ode to the fast familial bonds among those who find themselves together, accidentally or on purpose, through blood or by fate.
Set in the placidly picturesque northern California town of Bayview, “Crooked Little Heart” picks up where one of Lamott’s earlier novels, “Rosie,” left off. In that work, Rosie was 9, and the unexpected death of her father had left her bereft mother, Elizabeth, alcoholic and emotionally adrift.
In Lamott’s latest turn with these characters, several years have passed, and the family has taken on a new form. At 13, Rosie is poised on the awkward edge of adulthood, “skinny and lonely as a heron,” but she has managed to become a budding junior tennis star. Elizabeth has given up alcohol but still battles episodes of depression and nagging feelings of inadequacy. Rosie’s writer stepfather, James, fights his own demons of creative fatigue and parental confusion at replacing a lost father and raising a daughter who is not exactly his own. To fill the breach, James’ best friend, Lank, loves Rosie unquestioningly, as does Elizabeth’s friend, the hippie-ish artist Rae. Another sympathetic soul in the Ferguson orbit, the older, avuncular Charles Adderly, has stepped into the grandfather role, while Rosie’s own closet confidante and tennis partner, Simone, acts as a surrogate sister. All have come together to give Rosie their closest version of the “real family” she so desires, and they succeed, up to a point.
When trouble arrives, it is from far outside Rosie’s circle. A disturbing figure, Luther, begins haunting Rosie’s tennis tournaments, following her from match to match and eyeing her menacingly from the bleachers. An outcast, Luther senses in Rosie a vulnerability that will prove to be the flaw from which no amount of love–familial or other–might save her. In the end, it is this surprising twist–danger from far afield and not from within–that gives “Crooked Little Heart” its plaintive quality. For all their goodness and trying, the Fergusons are imperfect, so much like the “real family” they have tried to become.
Lamott, the author of four previous novels and two acclaimed nonfiction works–“Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year” and “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”–is a gifted chronicler of daily life. “Crooked Little Heart” is a bittersweet testament to the family, wherever we might find it, and to finding grace in the commonplace.
