The great American novel may be hard to define, but Adam Haslett is certainly having the great American career. Twice shortlisted for the Pulitzer and once for the National book award, he has followed up an acclaimed debut (the short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here) with three novels at dignified intervals of six to eight years, including the highly garlanded Imagine Me Gone. On the side, a constellation of fellowships, and a journalistic career. As a way to pursue a life in writing, I would say to my own students: this is how it’s done.
It’s strange, then, to read Mothers and Sons and reflect on just how much of his third novel wouldn’t make it through a writers’ workshop. Haslett is a writer of extraordinary strengths – he excels at an emotional undercurrent, the trancelike rhythms of routine and the cauterised numbness of trauma – whose architectural abilities, the skills required to craft the underlying tectonic structure of a story, seem strangely underdeveloped here.
Peter Fischer is working as a legal aid immigration lawyer, filling every waking hour with the bureaucratic tedium of court filings, appeals and affidavits, his caseload a litany of traumatic stories of flight and insecurity. Just as Haslett proved his acuity with his first novel, Union Atlantic, writing about the arrogance of bankers as the financial crash brought them to the forefront of public consciousness, he has once again situated a novel on a faultline of our times, as the incoming American administration promises to pursue its deportation agenda with unprecedented vigour. Elsewhere, Peter’s estranged mother, Ann, a secondary protagonist who is not afforded Peter’s first-person perspective, is running a women’s retreat.
Both live entrenched lives of apparent moral worth, with little room for emotional volatility. In Peter’s case this is because he won’t let anyone in, preferring instead to occasionally text Cliff, his not-quite partner, and invite him over for sex. In Ann’s case it’s because any emotional turbulence is resolved within the retreat’s listening circles. These are two very different kinds of torpid calm, but the effect is strangely similar. It turns out that the listening circles are just as much a deflection tactic as Peter’s solitude – despite aiming to help women open up about their struggles, Ann has signally failed for several years to engage with her feelings for Jeanette, another woman working at the centre.
Having established his protagonists in their isolation, Haslett proceeds to sustain that isolation for 200 pages, until mother and son eventually reunite and confront one another. The trigger for this reunion is that one of Peter’s colleagues challenges him, while walking to lunch, over the fact that he never takes gay cases. Peter takes the very next case that comes up, a young Albanian man named Vasel’s attempt to prove he would be in danger if sent home. This has profound consequences.
This is where I start to wonder about Haslett’s plotting. Is it enough, after years of avoiding gay deportation cases, that one casual inquiry should lead Peter to change tack so fundamentally? And does it satisfy the requirements of good storytelling that something so small should lead to Peter’s breakdown, and the confrontation Peter has with Ann about the tragedy that set them chasing their twin silences? Every storyteller I’ve come across would ask for more from the triggering event.
They’d also want their protagonists, in some way, to change: which may not be entirely true to life, but is surely something we expect from good fiction. At the end of Mothers and Sons, I don’t think either Peter or Ann have shifted in their courses. All that’s emerged is that these do-gooders are, in fact, people whose selfless deeds mask a colossal and appalling selfishness. Perhaps that’s the violence that underpins the United States, but I’m not sure it makes for satisfying plotting. It also becomes slowly more difficult as one reads to accept how similarly written Ann and Peter are; this isn’t a novel that finds conflict and stimulus in the contrast between its protagonists’ voices. It’s two people going through the same thing, in the same key, except one of them, Peter, is a more interesting character. Ann’s relegation to a third-person narrative feels like a telling admission of defeat – she struggles to come across as more than an extension of Peter’s crisis.
It’s frustrating to read a work where significant gifts are spent on a story that doesn’t really go anywhere. Haslett’s depiction of Peter’s love for Jared, a boy in the year above him at high school, his recounting of the death of Peter’s father, and his percussive portrayal of the minutiae of the courtroom, are magnetic. But the book comes to feel like circular storytelling, a tale freighted with false catharsis.
• Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett is published by Hamish Hamilton (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
