Diagnosis shapes family ties in 'The Condition'
"Happy families are all alike," Tolstoy famously observed in "Anna Karenina," but "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Unless, of course, you're dealing with repressed New Englanders: Then the unhappy families are pretty alike, too. We are - and I say this with love and respect for my family - uptight, priggish and determined either to sublimate our anxieties with vigorous physical activity in the fresh air or drown them in a steady stream of gin and tonics.
"The Condition," the title of Jennifer Haigh's third novel, is ostensibly a reference to Gwen, the middle child of Frank and Paulette McKotch of Concord, Mass. Gwen has Turner syndrome, a chromosomal abnormality that means she will never go through puberty. She will, in essence, have a woman's brain and a girl's body. As her father, a scientist, observes, she will always have "the powerful build of an Olympic child gymnast: the narrow hips, the shield chest." She will never be able to have children and won't top 5 feet in height.
The title, however, is actually a reference to the condition of the whole McKotch clan and the ramifications of their constitutional, inbred inability to communicate.
The book opens with a prologue set in 1976, when the family has gathered at Paulette's family's house on Cape Cod. Gathered with the McKotch family are Paulette's grown siblings and their families. But the important people Haigh introduces us to are Paulette and Frank, whose marriage is starting to fray, and their three children: Billy, 14, the golden boy; Gwen, 12, ominously underdeveloped; and Scotty, 9, a rambunctious, difficult boy. We get a taste of the sorts of people they will become as adults, when the novel proper begins in 1997.
Twenty years, and Frank and Paulette have divorced. On the surface their marriage collapsed because of the differing ways they cope with Gwen's diagnosis: Frank is clinical and realistic; Paulette first denies there is an issue to be discussed and then tries to infantilize Gwen. But in reality their relationship succumbed to the simple differences between Frank and Paulette.
Meanwhile, Billy has become a successful New York cardiologist who has hidden from his family the fact that he is gay. Gwen is working at a museum in Pittsburgh as a collections specialist. She has no boyfriend, few female friends and has withdrawn from even the idea that she will ever have a lover or a husband. And then there is Scotty, who dropped out of college, ran away to the West and wound up married to a drifter with an endless supply of marijuana. Now he and his wife have two kids, he has finished college, and he teaches English at a third-rate school.
And, alas, not one of the five is happy.
Haigh has demonstrated in her previous two novels an unerring ability to chronicle the ways people delude themselves. And in "The Condition" her touch with characterization is usually sure. Occasionally, Paulette's repression and Billy's gay domesticity feel a tad cliched, but generally Haigh's characters are layered and authentic.
The novel moves at a leisurely pace through the first half. In the second, however, the story gathers momentum when Gwen visits a Caribbean island where a handsome scuba instructor falls in love with her. She chooses to stay with him, setting off a seismic shift that causes the rest of her family to make choices that range from shortsighted to appalling.
And then we come to the end, which does not feel fully earned or likely. But Haigh is such a gifted chronicler of the human condition and I cared so much for each member of the McKotch clan that I was nonetheless happy to have spent time with them, and to have witnessed them growing up and, finally, learning to accept who they are.
"The Condition"
Author: Jennifer Haigh
Publisher: Harper, $25.95