The Sorrows of an American by Siri Hustvedt

The Barnes & Noble Review

Forget about crumbling farmhouses, hidden debt. Among the most complicated legacies the dead leave us are their secrets. A wrecking ball of this sort swings through Siri Hustvedt's brilliant novel The Sorrows of an American, the tale of Erik and Inga Davidsen, two New York–based Norwegian Americans. After the death of their father they find what appears to be record of his involvement in a murder. "Dear Lars," reads a note in his papers, "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 in earth. I believe in your promise. Lisa."

No one in the Davidsen family knows who Lisa is, not even Lars's widow. By profession Lars's children -- Erik, a psychologist, and Inga, a cultural critic -- do not let loose ends lie. "I've always felt that there were things Pappa kept from Mamma and us," Inga tells her brother, "especially about his childhood." What unspools from here is a moving quest for truth in the murky waters of familial memory. Inga and Erik become detectives within their own family, tracking down leads to distant relatives, searching for hints of what their father may have hidden in plain view.

Had Hustvedt stopped here, she would have put on a merely solid performance, but she stuffs The Sorrows of an American full of numerous subplots that allow for a powerful meditation on truth and memory, the inscrutability of the past, American amnesia, and the question of how much experience can be recorded. Unlike so many broad-scope social epics of recent note, Sorrows of an American says more through ambiguity than information. "Words create the anatomy of the story," says Erik, who listens to them all day long. "But within that story there are openings that can't be closed."

To read this novel is to watch Hustvedt's characters try to close those Pandora's boxes anyway -- though Erik's prediction ultimately seems to hold. Inga's late husband, the famous novelist Max Blaustein, has a biographer and a tabloid journalist chasing his ghost. Both of them stalk Inga at close distance -- the biographer, hoping for a whiff of Max's genius, the journalist creepily insinuating that there were things about her late husband that Inga did not know.

During the publication of Hustvedt's previous novel, What I Loved, tabloid journalists played a similar literalist number on her, reading into the plot of that book a veiled story about her private life with her real-life husband, novelist Paul Auster. There are, it is hard not to notice, similarities between Blaustein and Auster here, but it's also blindingly obvious these are red herrings. On some level, it feels like Hustvedt has created this frisson of autobiography in The Sorrows of an American to coax some readers to the peephole -- only to reflect back to them their own prurient gape.

On one concrete level, however, the novel owes a heavy debt to real life. Hustvedt has spliced sections of her own father's memoir into the text nearly verbatim, assigning them to Lars. She carries this tricky narrative gambit off beautifully, in part because Lars's memoir is so convincingly of its time. "Looking back at our early life," reads one mournful section in his voice, "the most astonishing feature must be how small our house was. A kitchen, living room, and bedroom on the floor came to 476 square feet."

Separated from these dignified, spartan roots by a distance of miles and money, Erik and Inga are adrift in a much airier, de-cultured world -- and this loss creates a grinding, needful anxiety. After his divorce, Erik rents out his downstairs apartment to Miranda, a single African-American mother and her child. He quickly becomes unhealthily obsessed with their comings and goings. But before he can cut himself off, he realizes the woman is also being stalked by an ex-lover, a performance artist who shoots photos of people (and their private spaces) without their knowing.

Hustvedt is a perceptive, eclectic art critic -- her insightful essays on painting are gathered in the wonderful book The Mysteries of the Rectangle -- but her attempt to frame themes by creating fictional artwork feels forced sometimes here. Miranda, the downstairs tenant, exorcises her sorrows in paintings that never quite come to life. This is a surprise. In What I Loved, Hustvedt mined a similar vein with greater success, inventing an entire oeuvre of paintings for one of her characters and then seamlessly braiding it into the story of a family fractured by tragedy.

The Sorrows of an American is far more successful at conjuring the emotional vertigo that overtakes Hustvedt's characters as they try, and fail, to make sense of where they are now -- especially Erik, who narrates the bulk of the book. During the day, his patients' confessions echo in his head. At night, a new set of voices take over, denying him any reprieve. "Sometimes, as I felt myself finally drift toward sleep," he says, "I would hear my father cough, a sound as unmistakable as his voice, and it would jolt me back to consciousness."

We are the stories we tell, as Joyce Carol Oates's famous tale instructed. What happens, though, when these stories erode with time? This rupture with the past, Hustvedt's novel suggests, forces us to fabricate new self-myths from the people we draw to us, sometimes at great risk. The Sorrows of an American boldly embodies this idea. Conclusions are reached and then obliterated; only by forming new and more relationships do the Davidsens get to the bottom of their most burning questions.

Following them to this piece of familial bitumen, this new bedrock, makes for a good read. The novel flows from one short section to another like water from lock into lock, on its way downstream. Ultimately, this sensation of movement, however, is a trick. Hustvedt's cast always finds new snags, new questions, all sparks of the great Catherine wheel of a question spinning at the heart of this book: Can we ever truly know one another? Once pried open, The Sorrows of an American boldly reminds, this ultimate Pandora's box never gets shut. --John Freeman

John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle. He is writing a book on the tyranny of email for Scribner.

From the Publisher

The Sorrows of an American is a soaring feat of storytelling about the immigrant experience and the ghosts that haunt families from one generation to another

When Erik Davidsen and his sister, Inga, find a disturbing note from an unknown woman among their dead father's papers, they believe he may be implicated in a mysterious death. The Sorrows of an American tells the story of the Davidsen family as brother and sister uncover its secrets and unbandage its wounds in the year following their father's funeral.

Returning to New York from Minnesota, the grieving siblings continue to pursue the mystery behind the note. While Erik's fascination with his new tenants and emotional vulnerability to his psychiatric patients threaten to overwhelm him, Inga is confronted by a hostile journalist who seems to know a secret connected to her dead husband, a famous novelist. As each new mystery unfolds, Erik begins to inhabit his emotionally hidden father's history and to glimpse how his impoverished childhood, the Depression, and the war shaped his relationship with his children, while Inga must confront the reality of her husband's double life.

A novel about fathers and children, listening and deafness, recognition and blindness; the pain of speaking and the pain of keeping silent, the ambiguities of memory, loneliness, illness, and recovery. Siri Hustvedt's exquisitely moving prose reveals one family's hidden sorrows through an extraordinary mosaic of secrets and stories that reflect the fragmented nature of identity itself.

The Washington Post - Ron Charles

…one of the most profound and absorbing books I've read in a long time. Hustvedt pushes hard on what a novel can do and what a reader can absorb, but once you fall into this captivating story, the experience will make you feel alternately inadequate and brilliant—and finally deeply grateful…This is a radically postmodern novel that wears its po-mo credentials with unusual grace; even at its strangest moments, it never radiates the chilly alienation that marks, say, the work of Hustvedt's husband, Paul Auster. The remarkable conclusion of The Sorrows is a four-page recapitulation of the story's images racing through Erik's mind—and ours. It's a stunning, Joycean demonstration that invites us to impose some sense of meaning on a disparate collection of events, to satisfy our lust for "a world that makes sense." I reached the end emotionally and intellectually exhausted, knowing how much I'll miss this book.

The New York Times - Sylvia Brownrigg

The Sorrows of an American is a thought-provoking book that offers pleasures across many different registers. Hustvedt's descriptions of the immigrant experience and the Minnesota landscape have a spare Scandinavian elegance, while her account of the life of a Brooklyn psychoanalyst feels quietly authentic. She takes unapologetic delight in intellectual characters who understand their lives through far-ranging reading and lively conversation…Hustvedt explored the milieu of New York writers and academics in her last novel, What I Loved—in fact, Leo Hertzberg, that book's art-historian narrator, appears briefly at a dinner party at Inga's apartment—and here again she proves herself a writer deftly able to weave intricate ideas into an intriguing plot.

Publishers Weekly

In her fourth novel (following the acclaimed What I Loved), Hustvedt continues, with grace and aplomb, her exploration of family connectedness, loss, grief and art. Narrator and New York psychoanalyst Erik Davidsen returns to his Minnesota hometown to sort through his recently deceased father Lars's papers. Erik's writer sister, Inga, soon discovers a letter from someone named Lisa that hints at a death that their father was involved in. Over the course of the book, the siblings track down people who might be able to provide information on the letter writer's identity. The two also contend with other looming ghosts. Erik immerses himself in the text of his father's diary as he develops an infatuation with Miranda, a Jamaican artist who lives downstairs with her daughter. Meanwhile, Inga, herself recently widowed, is reeling from potentially damaging secrets being revealed about the personal life of her dead husband, a well-known novelist and screenplay writer. Hustvedt gives great breaths of authenticity to Erik's counseling practice, life in Minnesota and Miranda's Jamaican heritage, and the anticlimax she creates is calming and justified; there's a terrific real-world twist revealed in the acknowledgments. (Apr.)

Barbara Hoffert - Library Journal

"Dear Lars, I know you will never ever say nothing about what happened." These words, found in an old letter addressed to his deceased father, shake New York psychoanalyst Erik Davidsen to the core. Was his father once involved in something questionable? Despite the misgivings of his sister, Inga, recently widowed and contending with both a conflicted daughter and a nasty reporter threatening to unburden herself of secrets regarding the duplicity of Inga's celebrated novelist husband, Erik tracks down the truth-which is both stranger and more gratifying than he could have imagined. But this is not a novel about solving mysteries: it's about the secrets we keep and the delicate tangle of relationships we maintain. Even as he sorts out his father's life, Erik must come to terms with his own devastating loneliness and his attraction to his new tenant, Jamaican artist Miranda-who is in turn being stalked, sort of, by her daughter's father. Complex relationships, indeed, but the narrative is breathtakingly clear, heartfelt, and involving. Hustvedt (What I Loved) has written a novel of quiet strength; recommended for most collections.

Kirkus Reviews

The death of their father sets a brother and sister on the path to discoveries about their loved ones and themselves. Sifting through Lars Davidsen's papers, son Erik and daughter Inga find an enigmatic note that suggests a dark secret in his past. It's only one of the mysteries about this respected and respectable Minnesota college professor, who sometimes would vanish from his home and walk for hours in the night. Erik and Inga have their own problems. Her husband Max, a famous writer, died five years ago; their daughter Sonia is haunted by recollections of 9/11 (the towers collapsed just blocks from her high school). Erik, a psychiatrist, finds himself entangled in the personal difficulties of Miranda, the new tenant in his Brooklyn brownstone, whose former boyfriend Jeff is leaving on their doorstep invasive, vaguely menacing photos of Miranda and their daughter Eglantine-and of Erik, when Jeff senses his attraction to Miranda. Other elements in the busy plot include Max's affair with an actress now threatening to make his love letters public and the various traumas of Erik's patients. Passages of piercing beauty evoke Lars's hardscrabble past on a Depression-era farm and as a soldier in World War II, as well as the complex bonds of love, guilt, regret and joy that bind families together. But the present-day story is marred by Erik's pat psychiatric insights and improbable plot developments that reach their nadir when the buyer of Max's letters turns out to be Erik's medical school buddy Burton . . . in female drag. Hustvedt (A Pleas for Eros, 2005, etc.) writes spectacular sentences that embody the American experience in brilliantly specific physical imagery. She's already writtenone great novel (What I Loved, 2003), and she'll undoubtedly write more. Here, she stuffs too much material into a narrative that buckles under the weight of too many ideas insufficiently developed. Ambitious, moving and sometimes maddening-but never, ever dull.

Customer Reviews

Number of Reviews: 1
Average Rating:
Write a Review

Product Details

• ISBN: 0805079084
  
• ISBN-13: 9780805079081
• Format: Hardcover, 320pp
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated
• Pub. Date: April 2008
• Sales Rank: 14,886

• Read a Sample Chapter

Read a Sample Chapter

Excerpted from The Sorrows of an American by Hustvedt, Siri Copyright © 2008 by Hustvedt, Siri. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.