Friends and fear

 

Mother’s Instinct by Barbara Abel is spare and controlled with a cruel conclusion. Two couples, next door neighbors, have sons who soon become the best of friends. Tiphaine and Sylvain rent their home and have close family.  David and Laetitia, enduring struggles as young adults, have no close friends, but eased into a comfortable life, enjoying a friendship they regard as priceless. 

“Friendship is a source of strength no one can live without. Everyone needs friends as much as sustenance and sleep. Friendship is nourishment of the soul; it cheers our hearts, feeds our minds, fills us with joy, hope, and peace. Friendship is life’s treasure and the guarantee of a certain kind of happiness.” 

Not always and a friendship can vanish as quickly as it began. One couple has a dark side, their marriage predicated by a dark secret around how they met and the loss of her job as a pharmacist. After her son dies in an accident witnessed by the neighbor and closest friend, she cannot forgive or forget. 

As the two couples struggle to sustain the friendship, the mother of the surviving boy wonders about the sincerity of friendships built around children. Granted, the relationship predated the children’s births, but all they had ever talked about was the boys. 

The friendship deteriorates and the surviving boy’s mother feels tremendous loss:  “she realized that that the tragedy that had befallen her friends had created an unbridgeable gulf between t hem. And the gulf would always be there. Forever.”

Meanwhile, the other woman plans a perfect murder, eliminating neighbors who irritate her and offer a replacement for her dead son.   

Abel transforms a series of ordinary little domestic routines and scenes  – pizza nights, playful children, ordinary disagreements over a hedge border – into a stunning warning. Pay attention to a mother’s instinct. Assess circumstances carefully before trying to overcome a strange fear. The plot calls to mind the 1998 non-fiction book “The Gift of Fear: And Other Survival Signals That Protect US From Violence” by Gavin de Becker. He writes: “Context is always apparent in the start of an interaction and usually apparent at the end of one, but too many details can make us lose sight of it. Every type of con relies upon distracting us from the obvious."

Predators and prey

 

Hauntingly beautiful and demonstrating the power of memory, The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo makes it easy to suspend disbelief about creatures who transition between fox and human form in Manchuria, 1908. The author doles out just enough detail in this magical tale, foxes are charming, clever and ageless, for readers to understand the differences with humans while preserving a sense of mystery. Foxes are sly in getting what they want. The more impulsive ones are ruthless, impatient predators while others are more self-disciplined, resisting their nature and striving to live a full millennium. 

Foxes take control with flattery, companionship and feigned subservience. Some foxes are reckless and others like Snow, the protagonist, are cooperative and wary in society: “Nobody likes to feel a fool, and the downside of playing with people’s feelings is the whiplash fury of betrayal.”

Only a few humans, often near death, recognize they are under the watchful eyes of foxes: "Dark as a bottomless pool, like a lake under moonlight. Bao is falling, sinking. Images flicker past: Ears lifted and a sharp muzzle across endless waves of grass. A lonely shape trotting down a mountain. Blink and he’s back, staring into the eyes of this stranger. Unreadable eyes, grave yet inhuman. They pierce Bao to the depths of his soul, or perhaps that’s the knife wound in his side.”

Interactions between foxes and humans require a delicate balance. Fox emotions are intense. Snow, the protagonist and fox wife, seeks revenge for the death of her cub, wrested by its den by a hunter on assignment for a photographer. “Grief continually amazed me with its ability to resurface at inconvenient moments. Whether I was sleeping in the grass or walking beside railway tracks by myself, the wind blowing and the lonely sun shining down, it always found me.” To track the photographer, Snow takes a job as companion for an elderly woman whose family owns a popular medicine shop. An investigator also tracks the photographer after the death of a courtesan in an alley, a beautiful woman last seen with a foxlike man.

The two searches collide, and during their travels, the two women each encounter a past love. Snow meets her estranged husband whom she partially blames for the cub’s death: “it was a lot easier to consider Kuro dead to me than to deal with the pain that his presence reminded me of. I should have known better. What you bury eventually comes to light in some form or other.” Her employer Tagtaa, in her sixties, encounters the young boy whom she was once served as a companion when both were children. Bao’s choices often displeased his parents, a pattern that continued into his adulthood as he pursues a career as investigator rather than scholar. 

Bao’s parents had forbidden marriage with Tagtaa, a child of a Mongolian concubine, but he still felt attraction. “She’s aged but hasn’t changed. Over the years he’s observed this phenomenon in his old friends – though their bodies have weathered, stretched, or shrunk, the same soul peeks out from within.” Notably, both Bao and Tagtaa admire foxes after memorable encounters with the creatures in their youth. Bao's experience left him with the ability to discern truth from lies, aiding his investigative work. And another fox, possibly Kuro, rescued Tagtaa as a child. 

Tagtaa longs to meet a fox again though Kuro, the fox husband, urges caution. Tagtaa confides her belief that foxes are gods or spirts, but he cautions that not all foxes mean well. “It depends on what you want to believe. What’s important is the ability to tell truth from lies,” Kuro explains. “Or perhaps truth from what’s merely hope.” Snow, his wife, overhears the conversation: “Hope, of course, is the most painful thing in the universe. Clinging to a thin strand is the most agonizing way to live.”

Humans feel angry panic after being tricked by a fox. “That’s what leads to all those tales of disillusionment and discovering yourself naked, covered with fleas and eating rotting meat in an abandoned grave," Snow notes. "Of course that exact scenario seldom happens, but it’s a good metaphor for how people feel when they discover they’ve been duped. That’s why a careful fox refrains from unduly influencing others.”

Parental expectations, lost loves, class inequality interfere with the present day for each character. Intelligent and self-disciplined foxes and humans who admire them are keenly aware of the period’s class and gender inequality, thus connecting with readers by offering relevant and modern insights. The novel is a cautionary fable for divided societies where the corrupt show disdain for those who work hard, the spendthrifts who scoff at the savers, the impulsive mock the patient, and the ignorant willfully resent the success and guidance from those with expertise.  

Many divides

Imagination can separate or connect individuals, leading to resentment or harmony - as suggested by  the enticing theme of Cristina Henríquez's The Great Divide. 

The book opens in 1907 with a fisherman scoffing that anyone might dream of breaking through the Cordillera Mountains connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans before reconsidering. “Perhaps the problem, he thought, was that a person needed faith to be able to see things that did not exist, to imagine a world not yet made…" Francisco had lost faith years earlier, raising his young son alone, and "his imagination itself had withered and, devoid of imagination, his entire world had shrunk to the point that he could not see beyond what as right in front of his face.”  

Francisco does not understand why more than 4,000 laborers sign on for the grueling work, including his own son who dreams about how the wages might transform his life.  

The book connects a diverse set of characters for a few short weeks – the fisherman who is furious at his son for not becoming a fisherman, a woman who leaves Jamaica to earn money for her sister’s operation, a withdrawn malaria researcher and his unhappy botanist wife, a small-time fish broker who joins his wife in organizing a protest.  Underlings become the scapegoats when foremen, doctors and managers are late or fail to do their jobs. 

Great Divide refers to more than the Panama Canal, completed seven years later, but also to racial and class struggles, family strife and internal conflicts, the difference between those who hope and others who have given up. 

Some characters outgrow the aspirations and potential of youth more quickly than others. A rough foreman, puzzled by his anger and lost time, is intent on making others around him miserable, willing to work his crew to death. He recalls a life of “fighting at school, roughing up anyone who looked at him sideways,” constantly angry without knowing why. He detested school and left early: “From what he had seen, it was just a means of getting people to behave in agreed-upon ways while fooling them into thinking it was for their own good.” Of course, a lack of education and skills is certain path to such servitude. He compares past dreams with reality. "Miller had never been to a circus, but one had come through South Carolina when he was a boy and talk of it had captured his imagination…. He was supposed to have been something by now…. But the world, changing quicker than he could keep up, had reduced him to this.” 

A few characters stand up for themselves, keeping their dignity intact, like the journalist who defies her editor by rushing to cover a village protest. Or the Jamaican woman who insists on purchasing medicine in the whites-only section of the store. Ada confronts the clerk who challenges her, resulting in a brief moment of triumph followed by lingering “Shame, and anger at being shamed” that can damage the soul.    

As a fisherman, Francisco despises the canal, recognizing that the engineering feat will transform Panama's economy. Still, he seeks to end the estrangement with his son, traveling to the noisy jobsite and witnessing earth “stripped and carved bare.” He finds it hard to look at the site crowded with machines, smoke, and piles of dirt:  “even more bewildering than what had been done to the land – what had been done to his country – was how many hundreds of men were participating in it…. What he saw as he stared across that vast chasm was not simply a canal, but a great divide that would sever Panama in two.” Grief overwhelms him and “He imagined himself descending into the Mouth not as a traitor or a martyr or a sacrificial lamb  but as a father whose love was infinitely greater than his sorrow or fear.”

Imagination and faith intertwine, best employed with hope than fear. At a low point, during the search for his son, Francisco’s imagination and empathy with youthful ambition returns. With that comes strength to appreciate what was special in the past and recognize the evolving possibilities that lie ahead. 

Lies and power

In The Little Liar by Mitch Albom, two young brothers enjoy a happy, comfortable life amid the vibrant Jewish culture in Salonika, Greece, just before the second world war. Both have a crush on a neighbor, Fannie. 

Sebastian, the older brother, is serious and pragmatic; Nico, younger, is charming and enjoys his reputation for not telling lies. Germans occupy the city, and a ruthless soldier uses the boy along with elaborate forms and procedures to convince Jewish families to cooperate with Nazi "resettlement," which entails boarding trains headed for Auschwitz concentration camp. 

Nico, separated from his family, learns that some lies are treacherous and others are essential for survival. Absolute truth is a luxury, impossible for people desperate to survive, controlled by those who have no compunction about lying. The teen embraces deception upon learning how he doomed his family.

Sebastian and his parents are transported to the camp while Fannie and Nico separately manage to avoid detection. The book follows the three children well into adulthood and their post-war lives - and another narrator, known as Truth, offers observations, historical context and insights about the various forms of lies:  “[T]his is a story of great truths and connections. You will find the big ones and the small ones interconnect.” 

People often avoid Truth, which early on made the narrator despondent until Parable advised donning a colorful robe. “Of all the lies you tell yourself, perhaps the most common is that, if you only do this or that, you will be accepted…. Humans do a great deal to be liked. They are needier than I can comprehend. I will tell you this much: it is often futile. The truth is … people ultimately see through efforts to impress them. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but they do.” 

After the war, one brother marries Fannie, and the marriage is unhappy, with the couple withholding real feelings and refusing to divulge their hopes and dreams. “It is nothing new; the lies spouses tell one another are most often omissions. You skip this detail. You don’t share that fantasy. You leave out certain stories altogether. You justify these acts by deeming me, the Truth, too agitating. Why stir things up?” The brother tells himself the deceit is motivated by kindness, but shame, guilt and distance soon follow. “Sometimes, it is the truths we don’t speak that echo the loudest.” Lies and the inevitable consequences become a prison.   

The other brother becomes wealthy, unhappy while insisting on living in a rundown apartment, lying about his profession and wallowing in depression. He refuses to seek help. “Help meant looking backward, and he wanted no part of that. Instead, he layered more and more sandbags between his past and present, building a dam high enough to stop even a massive flood of memories.” 

Truth is a tough taskmaster, at times suggesting that the partial glimpses of life through art, films or novels are another form of deception. And Truth and Parable conclude that people do anything – not so much for freedom but for forgiveness. The sentiment is repeated more than once. “A man, to be forgiven, will do anything.” 

Perhaps freedom is impossible without forgiveness, or forgiveness is a form of freedom along with truth. 

The narrator maintains that truth is not universal: “Were I truly universal, there would be no disagreement over right or wrong, who deserves what, or what happiness means. But there are certain truths that are experienced universally, and one of them is loss. The hollow in your heart as you stand by a grave. The lump in your throat as you stare at your destroyed home.” Some losses are permanent and irreconcilable.

Lies are associated with power and control and self-delusion about true motivations. “Humans are broken. Susceptible to sin. They were created with minds to explore, but they often choose to explore their own power. They lie. Those lies let them think they are God. Truth is the only thing that stops them. And yet. You cannot drown out noise with silence. Truth needs a voice…. A voice that could warn you how a lie told once is easy to expose, but a lie told a thousand times can look like the truth. And destroy the world.” 

This story is especially moving and suspenseful because true ramifications of lies told early in life unfold decades later for the three characters. Readers nervously turn the pages, wondering just when will the liar will be caught. 

 

Cost

Julia Lambert relishes what seems like a perfect life at the start of Cost, the novel by Roxana Robinson. A college professor, landscape painter and mother, she strives to observe and appreciate details in everyday routine: “The extraordinary loveliness of the world, how it was infinite and generous in its reach, how it could be soft and glistening, tangled and dense, velvety and bright.” That beautiful life spirals out of control and the novel's pointed insights and exquisite writing offer a model for any writer hoping to analyze family dynamics.

The book takes on the character of a holiday get-together, a family of grown adults who have not seen one another in a while and must overcome the distances that have developed. There are competing interests among two sets of spouses and two brothers with multiple and abrupt points of view, lending a sense of urgency as the family endures a roller coaster of emotions and questions revolving around guilt, shame, longing and lost trust. Robinson has a knack for suddenly, casually dropping eye-opening details from the past with a sentence or two.

Another son brings his brother's addiction to Julia's attention while she entertaining her parents at her cabin in Maine. Before hearing about Jack's addiction, her chief worry is the cognitive deficiencies of her neurosurgeon father and once-competent mother and how “they were starting to seem like strangers.” Both parents have a glimmer of awareness and Katherine, the mother, reflects on her losses:  “The small hard, bright facts, like nails that should connect it to the rest of her life, were missing. The place where her memory had been was gone, blurrily erased, like a window grayed by mist. … This was happening gradually, as though pieces of her mind were breaking off and floating away, like ice in a river.”  Still, Katherine is intent on keeping her condition to herself while mourning the loss of self, thinking about “how few new things she would do, how many things she would never do again…. Her world had narrowed.”

Despite her dementia, Kathrine senses the family's divides - between her daughter and ex-husband, between her two daughters and two grandsons. She mourns the loss of a close connection with Julia and wonders why her two daughters do not get along. She had once hoped that her daughters' disdain for each other were a phase and might end, but the attitudes were entrenched. “Hostility in the family seemed like such a waste. But she’d learned years ago that she could do nothing to fix this.” She appreciates time with Julia despite the inevitable flaws. “One thing you learned as a parent was humility.” 

Julia’s beautiful life falls apart that summer, exposing cracks. Initially in denial about the severity of Jack's problems, she insists that the entire family must confront her son at the Maine cabin, hoping that a family intervention might bring Jack to his senses. She also reaches out to Wendell, her ex-husband who has since remarried – both had affairs before their divorce – and a sister whom she rarely sees. She relies on the older brother, Steven, to deliver Jack to the cabin while shoving aside any interest or discussion about that son's work as an environmental activist and plans to apply to law school. Julia keeps talking about “we,” noting “Once we start, I guess we can’t stop it” and Steven realizes he has lost all agency for the endeavor: “he understood they had become partners.” He cares about his mother, gently confiding his concerns about Jack and divulging his own history with drugs, a problem quietly conquered without the support or knowledge of the family. 

Julia strives to be loving and supporting but sees her life was separate. “When your children were small, you tried to conceal your doubts and fears, your pettiness and failures. You tried to be what they needed – strong and certain, pure and loving. Of course they learned quite soon who you were – weak, uncertain, impatient, ungenerous. There was nothing of your character they did not know. Though there were parts of your life you kept to yourself…. There were secrets that should die with people.” 

Two family members, both the elderly mother and the addicted son, have a tenuous grasp on reality. Katherine, while pleasant, is confused and refuses to admit her challenges. “It felt precarious but exciting to carry on like this, to engage, ask questions. She felt as though she were flying, out in the wind, tied to something below by a thread. There was a continuous risk that she’d be found out, the air currents might suddenly tip her to the earth.”  She feels sly, moving through what is a slippery sense of time and space: “The thing was not to pause. It was like walking a tightrope: never think about falling, never stop moving.” 

She panics about losing memory. “Who were you if you had no past? If you existed nowhere but in this room, right now?” 

Katherine’s husband, Edward, as a retired neurologist recognizes that the outcome for those diagnosed with either heroin addiction or dementia is bleak. He grieves his wife’s decline as she repeatedly expresses newfound shock after being reminded about Jack’s addiction.  “He felt as though a blazing mirror had been held up to him. It was as though his entire life was being reassessed by someone else. He was powerless to control it, forced to observe it.” 

He also finds himself grieving that he never took the time to understood his wife, her needs and dreams. “The ideas was a kind of shock, that there might be another, alternate view of their life together. He’d always seen himself as the center of things, moving across the landscape of their life like a roiling storm center on a weather map.” Belatedly, he finds himself wondering if Katherine “might have been at the center of another system, possibly just as strong, just as roiling, but invisible on his map.” He concludes, “Getting older, it was impossible to see things the way you’d always seen them before.” Once renowned in his field, Edward feels rudderless, “Which is what age did to you, it stripped you of what you’d had, of your presence in the world.” 

The family is not close and all members distrust attempts for closeness. Growing up, Julia and her sister, Harriet, were discouraged from showing feelings, and the latter questions why society values close family ties. “What if your family happened to be made up of people with whom you had little in common, whose company you didn’t enjoy? Why wasn’t your family equally to blame, for not being close to you?” Both sisters tend to blame their father, Edward, and Julia assesses him. “He let nothing go by. He had to correct the world.” 

The intervention leads to a stint in rehab and eventual failure. Wendell's fury grows with futile attempts to convince Jack to listen and acknowledge the seriousness of his problem. “The way he acts, not looking at us, not talking to us, not admitting what he’s done, as though he’s too cool to deal – he acts contemptuous of us. … He devalues himself, the whole enterprise of having him and raising him – he acts as though it was all worthless. He doesn’t care about any of it…. He’s contemptuous of everything we’ve ever done as parents.” 

The struggle overwhelms the family and Julia slowly realizes that her life will never be simple or content again. “The unbearable pathos of objects. It was so strange that they all looked just as they had yesterday, though everything around them had been caught up in violent change. It was like a neutron bomb: a huge detonation, shattering all the humans but leaving the objects intact.”

Jack’s trouble rapidly spins out of control during the novel, at great cost for Julia. By the end, Julia wonders if she shares her father’s domineering presence. The sisters regularly accuse him of not being generous but in the end, he alone extends generosity that can only partially cover the economic costs that Jack's addiction delivers to Julia.  

Stripped of denial, Julia accepts the circumstances of Jack’s life and her own role with resignation.  “She believed in nothing so simplistic or logical as a natural moral system, no abstract code meeting out judgment. She didn’t think this was a punishment for adultery, nor for poor mothering, nor for her many sins, accruing over the years to a sum that required, by some terrible accounting, the unthinkable payment.”  Beauty no longer distracts her or gives her solace and instead, “Humility lay over everything like a gray mist.” 

She tries not to blame herself, but then, “of course her fault. She was his mother.” 

The power of being alone

 

Those corruptly enjoying power strive to craft rules to control a population’s behavior and very thoughts. Rigid rules in a small community aim to reinforce that power, ensuring hypocrisy, deceit and guilt. 

In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne bears a child out of wedlock while her husband is away, and she refuses to divulge the father’s identity. The Puritan community gives her a short prison sentence and orders her to display a scarlet A on her chest indefinitely. The intention is to remind the community Hester's adultery, misery and shame with every passing day: “giving up her individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and embody their images of women’s frailty and sinful passion. Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast… as the figure, the body, the reality of sin.”  

Hester crafts the large letter herself almost as a mark of pride: “On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore….” 

Those in power who fail to exercise self-control are often the most desperate in clinging to rigid rules, and this is the case with the infant’s father, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. “In no state of society would he have been what is called a man of liberal views; it would always be essential to his peace to feel the pressure of a faith about him, supporting, while it confined him within its iron framework.” 

Dimmesdale is tempted by true freedom yet fears the consequences of community-wide freedom and resists confessing his son. “Not the less, however, though with a tremulous enjoyment did he feel the occasional relief of looking at the universe through the medium of another kind of intellect than those with which he habitually held converse. It was as if a window were thrown open, admitting a freer atmosphere into the close and stifled study, where his life was wasting itself away…. But the air was too fresh and chill to be long breathed with comfort.”  In a community in a constant state of vigilance and scrutiny, transparency and truth become weapons for both those who support the rules and those who resist.  

Age, gender, institutions contribute to the chains of power in Hawthorne’s novel, as noted by Dimmesdale. “The good old man addressed him wit the paternal affection and patriarchal privilege, which his venerable age, his upright and holy character, and his station in the Church, entitled him to use, and, conjoined wit this, the deep, almost worshipping respect, which the minister’s professional and private claims alike demanded. Never was there a more beautiful example of how the majesty of age an wisdom may comport with the obeisance and respect enjoined upon it, as from a lower social rank and inferior order of endowment towards higher.” 

Seven years pass and the community continues to ostracize Hester and her daughter. The free-spirited, observant child, Pearl, plays alone, Hester is free to think as she pleases and Hawthorne comments, “It is remarkable, that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society.” 

Hester quietly makes herself useful for the community, and as a grudging respect eventually replaces the condemnation, Hester’s dogged embrace of the letter A becomes a sore point. The townspeople resent being forced to make explanations to newcomers and their own young children. Hester is increasingly urged to discard the letter, but she embraces her status and isolation: “The world’s law is no law for her mind…. In her lonesome cottage, by the sea-shore, thoughts visited her, such as dared to enter no other dwelling in New England; shadowy guests, that would have been as perilous as demons to their entertainer could they have been seen so much as knocking at her door.”  

Because the two spend so much time, Pearl is largely free of the town's rigid influences. Hester both fears and loves Pearl as she strives to educate the child on her own. Still, she worries about the girl's wild nature and her future, prompting Hester to wonder: “in bitterness of heart, whether it were for ill or good that the poor little creature had been born at all. Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind with reference to the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting even to the happiest among them?” 

The scarlet letter does not fulfill the intentions of those who would punish and shame Hester.   

Image courtesy of OpenArt.ai.  

Never-ending enigma

 

A Princess Diana impersonator with a sister who could be a twin, a precocious child raised in foster care, a cryptocurrency firm with organized crime connections all in Las Vegas – what could go wrong? 

Chris Bohjalian's The Princess of Las Vegas is a fast-paced mystery about a successful Princess Diana impersonator in a second-rate casino who is estranged from her sister after trauma with a stepfather followed by their mother’s death. Regardless of the hard feelings, the younger sister moves to Las Vegas with her precocious and newly adopted teenager, lured by a high-paying position with her boyfriend's crypto company. Meanwhile, the two brothers who own and operate the Buckingham Palace Casino are found dead in the space of a few days, suicides from all appearances, except that that the reader is witness to the first murder with the novel's early pages. 

Diana is popular among those who recall where they were on August 31, 1997, and the fictional Chrissy Dowling is a Las Vegas legend who relies on Adderall and Valium to get through two shows per night and days spent in a poolside cabana. She is intensely proud of her work, constantly researching the royal family and tweaking the show. She hopes that her tribute show touches “a chord of orphic remembrance,” reminding “us who we once were and, sometimes, where we once were emotionally and literally.” 

Still, the suicides followed by the death of Chrissy's love interest has her and other casino staff worried about losing their jobs. 

A lot of luck comes into play in the story – but in Las Vegas, that makes perfect sense. Often, we don't recognize the luck waiting before us.  “None of us, even when we are breathing our last, understand fully the role that chance will have played in our lives, the ways that what we supposed was good luck prevented us from experiencing better luck, or the way that a small misfortune saved us from a far worse one.” 

Princess Diana, a quiet, gentle and beautiful woman adored by the world but resented by her family, was an enigma and the contradictions of her life will continue to remain an inspiration for novelists for years to come. Consider Royal Escape, in which a princess yearns to flee the royal trap where security provides no protection at all. 

Bohjalian delivers a story with modern twists that dig deep into the mysteries of human nature and family angst.