It is: “End of Day 18 in Year 2019 of the Battle Against the Self, beset on all sides by demoralizing reminders of familial attachment.” His mother, for instance. If she asks him, “‘What have you been doing all day?’ A might say, ‘Naps occurred’ or ‘Videos were watched.’” His effort is as amusing as it is poignant: “Self-erasure required constant scourges, hence yesterday’s decision to become vegan.”
Adam’s mother, Lorna (a.k.a. X), a therapist, is overheard talking to his distant father, Roger (Y, of course), on speakerphone about her mother, Marika (G), who has sprained her ankle. Has she consulted a doctor? Who knows. She won’t answer the phone. “You know how she is,” Lorna says. Soon we will, too, but first Lorna has to go see for herself, and to persuade Adam to go along, which, surprisingly, suits him: “If the self was outraged at the prospect of spending five or six hours in the car with X, driving to Vermont to visit an old woman in a house full of mothballs and used Kleenex, if the self could conceive of nothing more hideous, then to be vanquished, the self must submit to this ordeal.”
To Adam, who sees her only on Thanksgiving each year, his grandmother is “[s]tooped, squarish, broad-faced, in brown wool pants and a brown cardigan that smelled of mothballs, with scuffed leather buttons dangling loose from black threads. Short gray hair that looked like she cut it herself. Pink-rimmed oversized glasses with smudgy lenses.”
During World War II, as a girl, she had bicycled across Amsterdam, delivering coded messages for her sister, a nurse in the Resistance. The family had “also sometimes hidden children in a kitchen cabinet. When soldiers came to arrest her sister and father, G escaped down the back stairs and bicycled out of the city to a convent school, where nuns took her in.”
At least that’s the story she’d told Lorna as a little girl — before suddenly disappearing without a word. Decades later, shortly after Adam’s birth, she’d resurfaced with a terse postcard from Vermont, where she’d taken up residence. This is the source of Lorna’s trauma. And in Marika’s unwillingness to answer questions about her own story, we (rightly) suspect she is storing up a long-ago trauma, too.
That’s a lot of plot and a pretty neat lineup of generational traumas. But “The Blue Window” is a novel in which the revelations are the story, and how these variously suppressed, repressed and poorly processed life-altering events come to light is at least as interesting as whatever horrible thing happened.
Lorna’s job as a therapist has an obvious interpretive value, as she has a propensity, as well as the professional wherewithal, for parsing every act and remark for its deeper meaning, even as she recasts every exchange into “sharing” and “feeling.”
But Berne has a delightful way with the healer-heal-thyself trope, because when Lorna finally decides to confront her mother about her long-ago desertion, all of that professional restraint dissolves and the result is at once painful and hilarious. And underneath the specifics of Adam’s and Lorna’s and Marika’s stories, there is the sense that a generational shift is itself a sort of natural trauma.
Berne, whose 1998 novel “A Crime in the Neighborhood” won the British Orange Prize, now the Women’s Prize for Fiction, is good at getting people’s subtle shifts of mood and understanding, and especially good at grounding these moments in sharply observed details.
Marika feels “a flabby blundering in her chest, as if her heart were trying to turn over.” Lorna sees “pale scarves of mist” over the water. A speedboat trails “a rooster tail of foamy wake.” The golden retriever waits, “his tail a plumy metronome.” A strip of grass is “shrapneled with foil wrappers.” A house is “saturated with the heavy aura of People Not Speaking. Like walking into a damp sponge.”
The tension between the immediate and the imagined or remembered is what makes this novel work, with Berne striking a satisfying balance between what happens, what it might mean, and what’s needed to go on. The past may be past, but its significance has yet to be determined. The possibilities are endless.
Ellen Akins is the author of four novels and a collection of stories, “World Like a Knife.”
Scribner/Marysue Rucci Books. 272 pp. $27
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