A BOY IN WINTER
By Maxine Chernoff
Crown, 241 pages, $22
Reading fiction by Maxine Chernoff is always an aesthetically satisfying experience. In her newest book, “A Boy in Winter,” lively, precise language quickly submerges readers into the characters and their turmoil. Chernoff writes with a poet’s incisive imagery, so that even out of context, sentences like, “The bride and groom kiss, their eyes floating like candles in water, full of hope and impermanence,” are worth savoring.
Much of Chernoff’s previous work, which includes volumes of poetry, short stories and novels, concerns characters at odds with some convention of modern life. Recently expatriated to northern California, Chernoff often uses her native Chicago to set her work, most notably in her recent novel, “American Heaven,” the story of four disparate characters, refugees from assorted other lives. Their stories burst out of their haven on Lake Shore Drive to span time and geography, weaving through past and present aspects of life in Chicago.
Much of “A Boy in Winter” also takes place in Chicago. This setting is gray and hard, an atmosphere of unrelenting chill, both meteorological and metaphysical. The central event of this story could be a trailer for the 7 o’clock news: “Boy, 11, kills neighbor boy with hunting bow.” But in examining the causes of this incident, and its consequences, Chernoff peels away layers of truth to places that would never emerge from a media account. The characters’ tangled connections and disconnections are revealed through several points of view and narrative devices.
The book opens with the somewhat acerbic voice of Nancy, a savvy single mother desperate to salvage a future for her son, Danny, the boy who killed his friend in a freak accident. She describes their lives in a series of essays, musings and carefully drawn recollections that are often witty and plaintive. “Angry women are spartans; they also have the cleanest refrigerators,” she tell us, and whether or not this and other of her observations are correct, her frozen emotional state is evident. Nancy is someone most women will relate to: likeable, competent, funny. She sounds like a terrific mother, not perfect, but who is? Her mistakes are the kind that any lonely, tired woman might make, the kind that are obvious mistakes only in hindsight. “You’re me,” Nancy tells us, “in bed with Frank, not uttering a protest when he tells me he’s taking Danny deer hunting for the weekend. Danny, who had to bite or tear pieces of toast into gun shapes because I refused to buy him a toy weapon.” Contemporary mothers can relate to this type of dilemma.
But when it comes to fighting for her son, she’s relentless, impatient with the legal and mental-health bureaucracies that have taken possession of Danny. When a social worker tells her Danny is suicidally depressed, Nancy snaps. ” `Of course, he shot someone. Wouldn’t you be, too?’ I can feel my face take on color, see spit fly from my imperfect lips. I’m a rabid dog. I’m her worst nightmare. But apparently, I’m no original.” As complicated as Nancy is, she is easy to understand, to visualize, to place.
Perhaps the most compelling voice is that of Danny, who eloquently tells his story in a letter to his psychiatrist. He is perceptive and sensitive for a 12-year-old boy, or any other age person, for that matter. His astute insight is a characteristic often ascribed only to children, especially those raised by one parent. Still, it’s a quality universally evident in the children who must carry narrative in fiction and film. Danny’s voice is particularly endearing, though, sober and unflinching as he links images with ideas:
“Sometimes I think I worry so much about what other people think of me because my dad left us, and I don’t want to repeat whatever mistake I made. But I was only two when I made that mistake, so how could it have been so bad? I’ve seen two-year-olds and they can be pretty stubborn, but they can’t really help it. . . . But maybe my dad didn’t know that. Maybe he thought I was the only two-year-old who wanted what I wanted when I wanted it.”
Danny may be the book’s most reliable narrator. He must see and resee his vision of events to get sense out of them, ultimately arriving at an accurate picture:
“Almost as soon as my mom started kissing Frank Nova, she started looking prettier. . . . I studied her lips for a while, thinking that maybe they had become different, but my mom has a little mouth with neat lips and nothing was different there. . . . I just concentrated until I decided what was different. Her forehead wasn’t worried anymore. That’s what I finally decided.”
Late in the book, as the story seems to wind down, there is a twist in the plot that creates a new suspense, but its third-person narrative feels less compelling than the intense first-person voices of Nancy and Danny. It changes the nature of the book, adding a cop-show segment to a story that thus far unravels like a Greek tragedy. Ultimately, that final section allows the tragedy to resolve, the ice to thaw, so that Nancy and Danny can move toward a more normal life.
In many ways, the main device of the book, the delving deep into the territory of headlines and news stories, is reminiscent of several notable recent books, all by women. Author Rosellen Brown wrote her novel “Before and After” after reading a news article about a teenager who killed his girlfriend. Sue Miller’s haunting novel, “The Good Mother,” renders comprehensible, even ordinary a tabloid headline that might read “Holding child, single mom beds lover.” Jane Hamilton’s sensitive “A Map of the World” could be sensationalized into “School nurse abuses kindergartner; daydreams as toddler drowns.” Jacqueline Mitchard’s best-selling “The Deep End of the Ocean” details how a young mother, seeking a weekend respite, loses her 3-year-old. Like Nancy in “A Boy in Winter,” the mothers in these books seem familiar, another driver in the car pool, one of the women in the bleachers at a youth soccer game.
Certainly news stories have always provided material for novels. Novelists are in the business of probing areas where TV cameras and journalists can’t go, specifically, into the psyches of victims, perpetrators, bystanders and survivors. What sets these newer books together is their articulation of the worst nightmares of middle-class women, the ones who want to do everything right just as the definition of “right” blurs, as the choices and circumstances of family life become more varied. These stories of mothers who lose their balance through accidental or innocent missteps are well-crafted and interesting, and they also strike a contemporary nerve. It is no wonder that Oprah Winfrey has chosen so many of them for her book club. “A Boy in Winter” might well be added to her list.
