We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
“THE POSSIBILITIES” by Kaui Hart Hemmings
(Jonathan Cape / Random House, $NZ34:99)
I’ll
begin this review with a painful confession. I never read the Hawaii-based
American novelist Kaui Hart Hemmings’ first novel The Descendants, though I knew it was highly praised. I did,
however, see the movie version (starring George Clooney) and I was a little
nonplussed. It, too, was highly praised as an insightful probe into the
complexities of (wealthy) family life, and I quite enjoyed it as a grown-up
drama. But I don’t recall it as living up to the best reviews. Had it been
over-sold? Or did it miss some extra factor that was found in the original
novel?
I had all this
in mind when I sat down to read Kaui Hart Hemmings’ second novel, The Possibilities. Assuming that the
film version of The Descendants
more-or-less followed that novel, then the two novels have much in common. Both
are set in locations usually associated with affluent people taking holidays
(Hawaii in The Descendants; a skiing
resort in The Possibilities). Both
have a family coming to grips with trauma (a wife rendered comatose in an
accident, and later dying, in The
Descendants; a son killed in an accident in The Possibilities). Both are very much “aftermath” stories, dealing
with how people reconstruct the past and try to adjust their lives once tragedy
has happened.
Main character
in The Possibilities is Sarah
St.John, very specifically aged 43, living
with her widowed father in the house
where she has, as a solo mother, brought up her son Cully. When she found she
was pregnant at the age of 21, she remained friends with Cully’s father Billy,
but she never thought of marrying him. And now Cully, at the age of 22, has
died in a skiing accident, cut down by an avalanche.
The setting is
affluent middle-class.
Breckenridge,
Colorado is “a small town… with 686
hotels and inns” because its population more than trebles in the skiing
seasons. Sarah has a job as host and reporter for a local infomercial channel
aimed at the tourists, and telling them where prices are best, which ski-fields
and pistes are open and so forth.
Narrated by her
in the first person and in the present tense, The Possibilities begins as a catalogue of the stages of Sarah’s maturing
grief. Within the first two pages she is looking at other boys the same age as
Cully and wishing she could still cuddle him:
“I look at these boys all the same age as my
son, these boys with mothers and fathers, hopes and problems, and an embarrassing
urge comes over me to hold them. To swoop them up in my arms, something that
Cully as a child always wanted me to do and I’d often get annoyed. You’re a
big boy. You can walk. At times he was such a jarring cargo, especially
when he was first born and I was only twenty-one. He felt like a school
project, the egg I was supposed to carry around and not ever leave or break.”
(Chapter 1)
The first wave
of grief brings out the protective mother’s attitude towards an infant.
Then there are
the irritations of other people extending sympathy and being too nice and
considerate to her in ways that sound either forced or patronising. Two or
three months after Cully’s death, Sarah has returned to her TV work and has a
hard time playing along with the type of trivia the job demands. Death puts
infomercials into perspective.
There’s also an
element of possessiveness and even competitiveness to her grief. Her friend
Suzanne is going through a messy divorce. Each woman wants to scream that her
problem is the more important. Each restrains herself from doing so.
Awkwardness hangs between them, especially as Suzanne’s daughter has taken it
upon herself to organise some sort of memorial event for Sarah’s son, which
Sarah sees as a bit of an imposition and an intrusion into her territory.
The world is
unhelpful. Sarah’s elderly father Lyle, now retired, spends much of the day
watching infomercials and buying junk. (Although later he proves to be more
perceptive than he at first seems.)
So the novel ambles
for about its first third or so, making us exactly aware of the social class,
the circumstances and the tastes of all these characters, as well as how
Sarah’s mental state is brewing. It is, dare I say, a little like a grief
therapy manual.
Plot development
as such begins only when, clearing Cully’s room out, Sarah begins to understand
that she might not have known her son as well as she thought she did. Perhaps
her memories of the recently deceased Cully are idealised ones? In the first
place, she discovers that her son supplemented his income with some drug
dealing. A relatively trivial matter in this milieu, where most of the affluent
ones seems to puff some weed recreationally.
More important,
a bit shy of halfway through the novel, a girl called Kit turns up.
She is pregnant
with Cully’s child.
At which point,
as is my custom, I abandon my synopsis, having given you the set-up but being
determined not to spike a new novel’s intended surprises, which would be
bad-mannered. Let’s just say that a lot of people become involved in Kit’s
problem – Sarah, Lyle, Billy, Suzanne – all with different viewpoints on
whether Kit’s pregnancy is a blessing or a curse.
There are some
moments of good writing here. When Sarah has just learnt Kit’s secret, she
opens the front door and gets a blast of the mountain air, which is like the
freshness of the new revelation to her:
“I open the front door; the air is cutting. I
will always love the mountains for this: the initial step outdoors, the
decisive air, the bruised blue of night and swarm of stars, the chomp of snow,
and the silence, all of it enlivening and heartbreaking. A chunk of snow drops
off the branch of the spruce tree and onto the hood of the angry-looking truck.
Motes sparkle in the air. I don’t know how it is that I’m registering the air,
the night, when here she is, Kit, this burden, this mystery. Maybe this is how
it will be from now on? Nothing can be shocking. Nothing could be harder.”
(beginning of Chapter 10)
There are,
almost inevitably, moments where Sarah reflects on how unknowable other
people’s families are:
“You can know people so well and still make
discoveries about them as a family, but you’ll never know everything, the
mundane day-to-day, the behaviours when the doors are closed. Families are all
such elite clubs.” (Chapter 15)
I do not
belittle Kaui Hart Hemmings’ ability to make vivid a particular social milieu.
And yet, in the
end, I did find this one a little too pat, too obviously created for the
middlebrow market who want an “issue” in their novels.
The author entertains
all the possibilities of what Kit could do with her baby, but it’s quite plain
to see what view she holds herself and much of the novel’s latter half reads
like polite propaganda. There is a little bit of humour in Sarah’s first-person
voice, but these characters are so reasonable and considerate about everything,
so ready to listen to other people’s views, that you long for an hysterical
outburst. And isn’t the novel’s timeframe a little off? Would a woman who
centred her life on her son really reach serenity, balance and a new view of
life a mere three months after her son’s death?
Maybe, but I don’t
quite buy it.
And what is it
about the first-person present-tense narration? Of course it manufactures a
sense of immediacy, but often it makes the characters sound as if they do not
know anything but the present moment.
Pardon me. I’m
sure many people will find this a meaningful and well-crafted novel. Apparently
a movie version is in the works, and I’m sure it will be the same sort of
tasteful affair that the movie of The
Descendants was.
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