Starred review from January 25, 2016
Here was the world unfettered by dread... The present had somehow ceased to be an emergency,” writes Michael, the eldest son of a tightly knit British-American family, when he receives his first dose of Klonopin. Pulitzer-finalist Haslett’s latest is a sprawling, ambitious epic about a family bound not only by familial love, but by that sense of impending emergency that hovers around Michael, who has inherited his father John’s abiding depression and anxiety. The book begins with the family as a nuclear unit, the narrative switching among the parents and the kids (Michael, Celia, and Alec), as a cure for Michael’s condition seems close. When tragedy undermines the unit, though, the search for an antidote takes on a new urgency, as Michael cycles through obsessions with music and girlfriends, and Celia and Alec attempt to keep their own relationships afloat. This is a book that tenderly and luminously deals with mental illness and with the life of the mind. Occasionally, the narrative style (it switches among monologues, letters, and messages from the doctor’s office) feels stiff. But in Michael, Haslett has created a most memorable character. This is a hypnotic and haunting novel. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM Partners.
Starred review from March 1, 2016
This touching chronicle of love and pain traces half a century in a family of five from the parents' engagement in 1963 through a father's and son's psychological torments and a final crisis. Something has happened to Michael in the opening pages, which are told in the voice of his brother, Alec. The next chapter is narrated by Margaret, the mother of Michael, 12, Celia, 10, and Alec, 7, and the wife of John, as they prepare for a vacation in Maine. Soon, a flashback reveals that shortly before John and Margaret were to wed, she learned of his periodic mental illness, a "sort of hibernation" in which "the mind closes down." She marries him anyway and comes to worry about the recurrence of his hibernations--which exacerbate their constant money problems--only to witness Michael bearing the awful legacy. Each chapter is told by one of the family's five voices, shifting the point of view on shared troubles, showing how they grow away from one another without losing touch, how they cope with the loss of John and the challenge of Michael. Haslett (Union Atlantic, 2009, etc.) shapes these characters with such sympathy, detail, and skill that reading about them is akin to living among them. The portrait of Michael stands out: a clever, winning youth who becomes a kind of scholar of contemporary music with an empathy for black history and a wretched dependence on Klonopin and many other drugs to keep his anxiety at bay, to glimpse a "world unfettered by dread." As vivid and moving as the novel is, it's not because Haslett strives to surprise but because he's so mindful and expressive of how much precious life there is in both normalcy and anguish.
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Starred review from April 1, 2016
What does it take to unravel a family? After a psychiatric hospitalization threatens to derail her life, Margaret relocates to the UK, then returns to the States as her husband, John, struggles to land stable employment. Their three children, Alec, Celia, and Michael, weather the ups and downs of a deceptively conventional upbringing until one disastrous night upends the future for them all. Haslett narrates this soaring, heartrending novel from the revolving points of view of each family member, plumbing the psychologies of his characters. The result is a polyphonic page-turner that slowly reveals its orbit around Michael, the eldest son. Michael's troubled psyche, an inheritance from his father, proves to be the troubling linchpin at the center of this intensely personal work. Haslett is the author of the short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here (2002), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and the Lambda Literary Awardwinning novel Union Atlantic (2010). Definitely a writer to recommend to fans of Michael Cunningham, Jonathan Franzen, and Alexander Chee.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)