Adam Haslett is one of those incandescently smart and elegant authors that the US seems to produce almost accidentally and to excess, names who haven’t quite risen to international literary stardom, but perhaps deserve to: think Jonathan Dee, Garth Risk Hallberg, Lauren Groff or Claire Messud. Haslett’s brilliant debut novel, Union Atlantic, looked into the bleak moral heart of the 2007-8 financial crisis. His second, Imagine Me Gone, was a meditation on fatherhood and depression. Now, with Mothers and Sons, he has written a book that circles around an absence: the alienation of a son – Peter, a lawyer in his 40s – from his mother, Ann, who runs an “intentional community”, a women’s retreat in the hills of Vermont.
This is a novel about practice. Chapter by chapter, we move from Peter’s world in the first person to Ann’s in the third, building up a picture of their lives, the rhythms of their days. Peter is an asylum lawyer in New York, his time spent with the desperate and destitute. His personal life is almost nonexistent – he is lonely, hopeless, trapped by his own past. After a brief and hesitant affair with a schoolfriend, tragedy strikes. He blames his mother for the guilt that has haunted him ever since. Now he buries himself in his cases. “I work – that’s all I do. I get people to tell me their stories, I try to prove what they tell me, then I do it again.” It’s a thankless task, with the state increasingly hostile and his co-workers as harassed and frustrated as he is. “Travelling into one life after another, intimacy without intimacy.” Then a new client arrives, a gay young man, an Albanian. The shame and horror of his story opens up a window into Peter’s own dark past.
His mother was a priest in a small New England town until, struck by midlife revelation, she decided to leave her all-American husband for Clare, an academic. With another friend, Roberta, the women buy land in Vermont with the aim of establishing a “ministry of hospitality”. Here they meditate and welcome broken and battered women to whom they listen without judgment. We recognise the clear parallels between the two forms of practice – law and counselling, the acts of service that mother and son perform, each of them making penance for the past. Peter might be describing his mother and her visitors when he says of his clients: “I’m trying, through their suffering, to reach my own.”
Peter has a sister, Liz, a comic and chaotic figure who hosts cosplay conventions and cares for dying dogs (and a child and useless husband). She’s researching an ancestor – a general in the revolutionary wars. At one point, Ann notes that she has traced the family’s male line through history – “what about all the women?” This feels like one of the energising frictions in the novel: it is a deep and complex portrait of the love between a mother and her son, giving this relationship the same degree of attention that Turgenev gave to Arkady and Nikolay in Fathers and Sons, a book with which both this and Haslett’s previous novel are in clear dialogue.
Turgenev’s tale turns upon the way misunderstandings both spoken and unspoken establish themselves as unbreachable barriers between generations, how politics becomes a tool to define ourselves against the conventions of those who raised us. Haslett shows that little has changed over the century-and-a-half since. As with Turgenev, we want to reach into the novel and force Ann and Peter to face each other, to speak their love and truth rather than evasion and falsehood. Haslett manages both to stoke our frustration with his characters and to make us feel their pain and solitude. Ann and Peter are maddening, admirable, tragic and utterly human.
There is nothing obvious or easy in the way that Mothers and Sons comes together in its quiet and moving finale. This is a story that feels as deep and real as life itself – a beautiful portrait of a mother and son.
• 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
