LIVING TO TELL
By Antonya Nelson
Scribner, 317 pages, $24
No contemporary fictional subject is more American than the family. And though female writers have often been dismissed as “domestic,” as if life in the kitchen could never compare to the trenches, I aver that stories about ourselves at home transcend the sex of the storyteller (think of Richard Bausch, David Long, Andrew Giardina) and illuminate the sheer mystery of life with as much awe as grand epics do. This is not to say that all such stories succeed. Too often, fine-boned, fashionable tales of quirky families merely tweak our ironic sensibilities and leave us less than nourished.
Antonya Nelson has explored some familiar domestic territory over the course of three collections of short fiction and two novels, but she has always seemed an independent sort with a fine gift for observation. We expect a writer of such solid talent to mature steadily. She has garnered accolades that include a Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. Clearly, she has the right stuff. Now her new book and third novel, “Living to Tell,” takes a giant step into greater complexity and a more assured style. Her tales of fractured families and twisted love have always amused and touched readers, and her collection “In the Land of Men” was tough and provocative, but “Living to Tell” trumps them all.
The Mabies of Wichita, Kan., prove that political conflict and negotiation are very real within families, where on a daily basis people choose how to live with one another. There are truths to hide, just as there are some sorrows that can only be borne alone. There is also the balm of affection and intimacy, and habits of respect can prove stronger than regret and blame. That there is love among the family’s members makes the stakes higher; that there are children makes the outcomes more urgent.
This novel captures characters in the process of deciding what kind of people they want to be, and it is Nelson’s special genius to bring that moral question to Mabies of three generations under one roof, where individual decisions always affect the stability of the family. The gift she brings the reader is that the Mabies are good, and that the family is better. Each member is flawed (Even the baby, poor sweetie, is ugly!), but over the course of a year they all learn how to live larger lives.
The year begins when the only son, Winston, 33, returns home from prison where he served five years for vehicular manslaughter after killing his beloved grandmother in a drunken accident. At first his guilt and his family’s blame would seem to be the subjects of the novel, but Winston turns out to be a quietly auxiliary character whose primary function in the family is to nurture his sister’s young son. Forgiveness of oneself and by others comes out of time and the displacement of the past with present dailiness, and Nelson illustrates this with consummate skill. She also gives Winston’s guilt a turn with the memory of what really happened.
She does an odd, old-fashioned thing, calling the parents Professor and Mrs. Mabie, but their formal titles denote not authority but benign distance. The professor, recently retired, is grieving the death of his best friend, another professor, Betty Spitz, whose constant affection and honest advice have buoyed him for 30 years. Mrs. Mabie’s gradual loss of vision is so perfect a metaphor for her emotional remove that one of the girls says she’s doing it on purpose. Yet this is the mother of whom Nelson writes, “Roy and Petra leaned their hot heads against her breastbone when the thunder rumbled and it seemed to Mrs. Mabie that, were she (her grandchildren’s) only mother, her heart would open fully beneath that bone.” They all have depths their kin have not plumbed.
Most moving is the relationship of the 30ish sisters, Mona and Emily. Mona’s disastrous affair with Emily’s childish ex-husband hangs over them. Not only are their grievances eventually dismissed, but Emily, battling cancer, gives Mona a kind of gift of life. None of this is sentimental, and there are many surprises, such as Emily’s late discovery of love.
The structure of the novel is subtly innovative. Nelson moves among points of view, using the first part of the book to acquaint us deeply with the family members, all of whom live in the big old Mabie house. That comprises a single day. Then she skips ahead and covers a few weeks, introducing complications that are threaded into the final section, covering a greater period of time. The effect is a sense of escalation that also deepens the reader’s involvement, as if she has moved her story from seed to flower.
Nelson accomplishes something very much like what Louise Erdrich does, which is to make the protagonist not a single character but the composite family. Along the way, she employs an emotional leisure that allows her to write insightful and lyrical passages that are pure pleasure to read. And Winston? He is like a man standing patiently at a border, waiting for the country to be large enough to let him in. Happily, for him and for us, he is rewarded.
