The Sorrows of an American

There's true pleasure in watching an accomplished novelist skillfully create a multilayered story that combines complex and intensely interesting characters with an absorbing plot. In her latest novel, Siri Hustvedt has accomplished that task with sensitivity and quiet passion. Following the death of their elderly father, Lars Davidsen, a history professor at a small Minnesota college, his children Erik, a New York psychotherapist, and Inga, a cultural critic, find themselves in the family home sifting through their father's papers. In the course of their search they encounter a letter dated June 27, 1937 that states: "Dear Lars, I know you will never ever say nothing about what happened. We swore it on the BIBLE. It can't matter now she's in heaven or to the ones here on earth. I believe in your promise. Lisa." That discovery launches the siblings on a quest to find the truth about the event that prompted the cryptic message. While their patient investigation eventually uncovers that truth, it's only one of several mysteries revealed in the course of this intricately plotted novel. Woven through Erik's first person narrative are excerpts from a journal kept by Lars Davidsen that recount fragments of family history on a farm in Depression-era Minnesota and continues through Lars's service in the bloody battles of the South Pacific in World War II. Intriguingly, as Hustvedt reveals in her acknowledgements, the journal segments are drawn from a family memoir written by her father, who died in 2003. Through the journal, Erik gradually learns of the hardships that shaped his family and gains new insights into the mind of this decent if emotionally constricted man, groping for an understanding of the "earlier generations who occupy the mental terrain within us and the silences on that old ground, where shifting wraiths pass or speak in voices so low we can't hear what they are saying." Alongside these family stories, events in Erik's life take a dark turn. Miranda Casaubon, a book designer and artist, and her precocious five-year-old daughter Eglantine rent an apartment on the ground floor of his Brooklyn house, and he is quickly, if disturbingly, drawn into the circle of their lives. He discovers photographs, some of them defaced, of the mother and daughter and learns they're being stalked by a performance artist named Jeffrey Lane, Miranda's former lover and Eglantine's father. Soon Lane adds photographs of Erik to his collection, and the tension between them builds to an inevitable confrontation. Erik's character also is revealed through the counseling sessions he conducts with his patients, identified only as "Mr. T." or "Ms. W." In these often frustrating and sometimes painful encounters, Hustvedt exposes the benefits and limitations of psychoanalysis, using them to explore Erik's internal struggles --- his growing attraction to Miranda, his unease over Lane's bizarre activities and his desire to deepen his understanding of his father's life.

"Dream economies are frugal. The smoking sky on September eleventh, the television images from Iraq, the bombs that burst on the beach where my father had dug himself a trench in February 1945 burned in unison on the familiar ground of rural Minnesota. Three detonations. Three men of three generations together in a house that was going to pieces, a house I had inherited, a house that shuddered and shook like my sobbing niece and my own besieged body, inner cataclysms I associated with two men who were no longer alive. My grandfather shouts in his sleep. My father shoves his fist through the ceiling. I quake." Siri Hustvedt's The Sorrows of an American explores generations of memory overlapping in the present. At its simplest, the novel is about three watershed events burned into the memory of many American families: the Great Depression, World War II, and September 11th, 2001. But to say this is to over-simplify a rich book with incredibly present, whole characters, made real for the layers of memory wound within each of them. One has the sense that Hustvedt's characters have always existed, that she did not create something new but captured all the lovely loneliness, all the complexity of baggage-heavy humanity. This sense of realism can be attributed to the backwards and forwards chronology of the text (a pre-existing history that informs the present), the exploration of dreams that make the "reality" of the text seem more real in contrast, and references to real events (September 11th, World War II) and fictional creations (poems, films) that impact the lives of the characters. The novel opens in media res: the narrator's father is dead, and he has to wait until spring to bury his father on the farmstead of his youth. The first-person narrator is a psychoanalyst and a divorcee, a Brooklynite by way of rural Minnesota. We see the push and pull of his disturbed patients and his own changing moods as he goes over his dead father's memoirs and attempts to comfort his sister, Inga, an author mourning both her father and her legendary literary husband. Meanwhile, Inga is consumed with warding off threats to her husband's reputation while raising their world-sensitive daughter alone in the wake of September 11th (an event the girl witnessed from her window, and writes about obsessively in her poetry). The conversations between brother and sister often return to the farm of their childhood, and some of Hustvedt's most beautiful passages are those memories told through the eyes of the young pair. Their memories, and those of the remaining members of their father's generation, are all they have to unravel a mysterious event mentioned in their father's papers. The effect of this excess of memory--memories of his own life, and the written memories of his father--manifests itself in the narrator's loneliness. He continually finds himself saying, "I am so lonely" aloud in his empty apartment, most often after interactions with his alluring tenant, a br

I really enjoyed this novel; fascinating reading, intelligent, well researched on neurobiology (which is my line of work, and found it well represented without errors). Hard to put down. So full of material it is bursting at the seams. In short, I am with the other 4-5 star reviews and cannot follow the 1-star criticism.

There are other couples who view writing as the "family business," such as Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman. There have been no collaborations, but the influence of one upon the other can be discerned. In this case, Paul Auster may not have input into the writing of Siri Husvtvedt, but the fact of their union seems to reflect on both their writings. This luminous haunting novel has a dreamlike quality, with dreams and memories holding equal weight. For such a slim volume, it packs quite a whallop.

I had never heard of this author until I heard her speak at the Key West Literary Seminar last then. Since then I have bought and read all of her books. How can she do what she does on a page? How does she make the pages fall away and take me into a world that I never forget? I don't know the answer, but I do know as soon as I saw she had a new book out, The Sorrows Of An American I rushed right out to buy it -- and in the last two days have been transported, once again by a world I did not know I was missing. Like her previous books, the characters (Erick, Miranda, Eggy, and Inga, and Max) in Sorrows of an American are now a part of my life. I shut the book last night and am still thinking of their world. Missing it, actually. While following a mystery - edged with both agitated grief -- I learned about memory, light, darkness, and art. No question about it -- this book will not disappoint you: the kind of reading experience that makes you re-remember the power that can be found in bound pages when created by a true artist. Plus, the story here is simply - INTERESTING.