Time play

Real Americans by Rachel Khong is a family saga – an odd mixture of fantasy, suspense and speculative fiction that toys with genre and sense of time. 

The novel has three distinct sections, with a woman, her son and mother serving as narrators, lending adding to the sense that time is fluid with no set beginning or end. The first section starts in 1999 with Lily, a Chinese American who struggles with money and resists the ambitious goals her mother has set for her. An unpaid intern at an online travel magazine in New York, Lily meets her supervisor’s nephew – a wealthy private equity asset manager. Raised by ambitious parents, both are lonely and lost. 

Mistakenly deeming such feelings as compatibility, the two marry. “If our bodies disappeared – if they vanished – and what remained was only our souls, I was certain they would share a resemblance. Both us had been formed like stones in a river, washed over by our parents’ expectations – the forceful currents of them. No wonder we were drawn to each other.” 

The connection is not sustainable. Lily, while young, was grateful her parents do not expect her to pursue Chinese language or culture, but questions emerge later. While pregnant, accompanying Matthew on a business trip to China, she visits the university her mother attended and meets Ping. He marvels how she cannot speak Chinese and how little she knows about her mother’s background, suggesting that she is a “real American.” He asks that she deliver a sealed note to her mother. Instead, Lily reads and discards the private communication.

Lily also learns that her parents and Matthew’s father were once colleagues who experimented on their own children in a quest to give humans better use of time. This explains why her son, Nick, appears more Caucasian than Chinese. The discovery prompts Lily to flee her mother’s control and Matthew’s stifling family wealth. 

The second section jumps to 2021 and Nick growing up the Pacific Northwest in humble circumstances. For fifteen years, Nick assumes his father abandoned the family and his mother is his only relative. Both mother and child have moments when time eerily is suspended, when a few moments can seem like weeks, allowing them to focus. The two have little control over the sense of timelessness. “Life always seemed too short, but now, alone, life seems far too long.” 

A precocious high school friend teaches Nick to drive and lets him use computer connected to a laptop. The two wonder why Nick looks nothing like his Chinese American mother. So the teens get jobs on an oyster farm, raising money for a DNA ancestry test and Nick soon reconnects with his wealthy father. He keeps the discovery to himself and “justified the lies upon lies by reasoning that she [Lily, his mother] had been the one to lie to me first.” 

Wealth transforms Nick’s life. A hefty donation allows him to join his friend in applying to top-tier schools and both head to Yale where different interests ensure that the friendship fades. Later, Nick has a luxurious place to stay in New York City for a summer job and a professional job waiting after graduation. Entitlement, followed by self-awareness and shame, contribute to distance with his father and estrangement with his mother.

The third and final section is the story of May, Lily's mother, who fled China and yearned to improve the human experience but loses her daughter in the process. In her eighties, she observes Nick, envying his youth and ability to start anew. “People once looked at me the way they look at him, with open and interested faces. It was that way for me, before.” 

Grandson and grandmother connect in San Francisco and May recalls her plans to flee the brutal restrictions of Mao’s China. May had two options – to leave with Ping, the man she loved by swimming away in the night, evading patrols, or accepting passage on smuggling boat with a graduate student who long admired her. Calculating the odds of success, May chooses the latter plan, setting off with a man she does not love for the United States. Ambition takes priority over love. “In America, my ambition, like a flame had only grown. I had hoped for more time in this country – this place with its abundant promises. Without time, ambition is worth nothing. It is only frustration. Time was what I wanted, more than anything.” 

May accidentally becomes pregnant and is not close with her daughter, Lily, other than imposing her own ambitions on the child. May is disturbed when eight-year-old Lily gives her a watch for Mother’s Day. “In Chinese, giving a clock is bad luck. It suggests the end. In giving a clock, you’re reminding someone of the reality, the eventuality, of their time running out. My daughter, the American girl – of course she didn’t know.” 

May’s expectations for Lily are high. Her constant reminders that the girl is gifted and superior cause the child's self-esteem to wither. With so much of her life behind her, so many relationships in ruins, the many “what ifs” trouble May. Repeatedly, May chose career over love. “No, it didn’t make much sense, that I despised and thought so highly of myself at the same time. How tangled it all was! The more I hated myself, the more I needed to prove my extraordinariness.” By doggedly seeking immortality, resenting any interruptions to her career, she ensured self-isolation. “Later, I learned that life lay in the interruptions – that I had been wrong about life, entirely.” 

With old age, she reflects, the “future shrinks with each passing second.” She no longer minds time rushing onward and instead relishes the present, however limited. “All this while, instead of seeking more time, I could have been paying attention.”  

The three narrators learn that wealth does little to cure loneliness, and all reconnect at the end. The story is about parental expectations and feeble attempts to shape children. The title prompts many questions about who are the “real Americans” and how people can create meaningful lives or reject such endeavors, refusing to respect others, especially one's children, who might create meaning in other ways. Lily, Nick and May each display self-reliance even as curiosity and individuality reign. 

Redemption

 

Flags on the Bayou by James Lee Burke is set in the fall of 1863. Much of Louisiana is occupied by the Union Army. The Civil War rages, and bitterness runs high with rampant brutality and property destruction. Slaves still toil and plantation owners still practice cruelty, espousing lofty excuses. Increasing numbers of southerners realize the war’s end won’t deliver peace for the South.

The book is a masterpiece, focusing on a small area between Baton Rouge and New Orleans and a few months of the war while encompassing themes that resonate today. One observer of a battle, a schoolteacher abolitionist from Boston, observes: “I think we may be watching a prelude to our nation’s ultimate fate. Civilization follows the sun. We have scorched our way to the other end of the continent. No matter how much we took, no matter how many living things we killed, there was never enough.” 

Six characters of various backgrounds narrate, and each has reasons for tremendous resentment and distrust. All struggle regret and guilt, having colluded in murder, maiming and entrapment, at times targeting one another.  As one character observes that “the content of your dreams does not take orders, and a stone bruise on the soul can be forever.”

Two are women of color who have suffered horrific abuse. “I have just seen too many women hurt by men,” says Hannah Laveau, a woman searching for an infant son separated from her during a battle. “See they cain’t abide what they are; it’s not who they are, it’s what they are. They are full of hate when they come out of the womb. And if they’re not, it’s taught to them. The only thing valuable in their lives is the belief they are better than us.” 

The six characters eventually expose their vulnerabilities, pain and grief with one another. By the end, forgiveness is the only way forward. Suffering and thoughts of escape via suicide are set aside. “You can become part of the Milky Way just by looking at it," notes the abolitionist. "Do you want to throw that away?”

The misfits in southern society eventually wage battle against a common enemy, discovering that working together is far better than any righteous insistence on a pointless cause based on power and divisions. Rejecting and escaping the South’s rigid class system and ways is the only way to find peace and redemption.    

Of course, many other characters in the book, not to mention the world today, cannot overcome cultural differences and feelings of insecurity and superiority so easily. Burke foreshadows the conclusion by noting in the early pages: “Voltaire had no answer for mankind other than the suggestion that we tend our own gardens and let the lunatics go about their own way.” 

Devouring

 

Wolf at the Table, the family saga by Adam Rapp spans 1951 to 2010. A withdrawn, hardworking  veteran of World War II and a devout Catholic mother raise six children in their middle-class home in Elmira, NY. The mother is a tough taskmaster, compensating for the husband's PTSD. A portrait of Jesus overlooks the dining room table, but the mother is in command. Catholicism is a rote requirement, practiced with little reflection or care.

The novel skips through the years, the chapters loosely tied to key historical events and narrated by the various family members. Each adult child displays a steely resilience, an individuality honed by a desperate urge for privacy that comes from growing up in a large and intrusive family. 

Four of the children emerge from the home with strong personalities, secrets and unresolved issues. With the haphazard choice of years and the multiple narrators, Rapp gives his characters privacy, ensuring that readers achieve limited understanding of each character's motivations.  

Myra is a central character, a key narrator who manages to maintain family connections. The novel starts with her furtively reading her copy of The Catcher in the Rye at a diner near her home. She meets a young man that afternoon who drives her around in his car, abruptly displaying reticence when she mentions the size of the family. That evening a nearby family is slaughtered, but Myra does not mention the stranger or this prying questions. 

Myra eventually becomes a nurse, working at a state corrections facility while failing to care for herself. She marries and raises her son as a single mother after her husband develops schizophrenia and flees. Her angry brother Alec suffers sexual abuse as an altar boy from the parish priest that goes either unrecognized by the family, or perhaps unacknowledged. He also lies and steals, and the parents banish him from the family home.  The youngest sibling dies as an infant. Joan has developmental challenges and never leaves home. Fiona aspires to to be an actress while living a hedonistic and impoverished lifestyle in New York City. Lexy, the most ambitious, pursues an education and manages to escape the family’s unhappy choices. Her brief time as narrator role ends after she marries a man who can and does assist other family members through illness and other difficulties. The couple is generous, but also keeps a distance and sets boundaries. 

The story takes a disturbing turn in the pre-internet 1980s when Alec sends his mother a series of postcards from various towns with names, two-digit numbers along with an ominous message, “Saying hello and goodbye.” Years later, Myra finds the cards. The internet is widely available in 2000 yet she shows no curiosity, seeks no proof. Instead, she simply writes, expressing her suspicions: “If you are hurting these boys you need to stop yourself. I implore you to take a long, hard look at your life.” There is no call to the authorities – and the reader can only wonder how much blame the family, especially Myra, should shoulder for Alec’s many crimes. 

The children grow up, well practiced at masking true feelings from a disapproving mother, and as adults delude themselves about the problems at hand and the past's influence. The siblings are not close and occasional family get-togethers are similar to Catholic rituals, rote and meaningless. Mental illness is rampant and no character is truly at peace. There is more than one wolf at the table.