THE LOST MOTHER
By Mary McGarry Morris
Viking. 274 pp. $23.95
This is a perfectly lovely book about perfectly awful things.
Eleven-year-old Thomas Talcott and his little sister Margaret have been abandoned by their mother. The Great Depression is under way; their father has lost his farm and most of his livelihood as an itinerant cattle-butcher. Homeless and hungry, the Talcotts are living in a tent. And a long Vermont winter is coming on.
A couple of chapters into The Lost Mother, you are inclined to think, well, at least things can't get any worse. But there you fail to reckon with Mary McGarry Morris's prodigious talents as a weaver of intimate, emotionally intense and unrelenting narratives. We watch through the lens of young Thomas's dawning awareness as events pile up, the large tumbling upon the small.
The boy gets in trouble with the local sheriff after being cheated by a greedy store-owner. The father's search for gainful employment is stymied by one minor calamity after another. In an irruption of childish rage, Thomas drowns his sister's kitten. And then the land on which the family's tent is pitched gets sold out from under them.
Okay, that's enough, let it end, you think. Give the poor kids a break. But it doesn't end, and the reader is dragged along like a figure in a nightmare, able to see full well what is going to happen, yet powerless to intervene.
What makes the narrative bearable -- indeed often quite beautiful -- is Morris's wonderfully limpid prose and her sympathetic treatment of all of her characters, even the ones who are really, really hard to like.
Morris has been compared to Steinbeck, and aptly so, but there is a fair dose of Dickens here too, especially in her depiction of these children and their plight, which is sometimes witty, sometimes harrowing, but never condescending or romanticized:
"Margaret's shoes hurt worse than ever. She had grown a lot over the summer, but nowhere was it more apparent and painful than her longer feet crammed each morning into tight shoes that rubbed her heels and big toes raw. All summer long she'd gone barefoot, but now with the cold and the walk to school she had to wear the only shoes she had. Margaret begged for new ones. Be patient, her father said. Next month after he had enough saved to move them into the house he'd bring her into town for the best pair a girl ever had. What about me? Thomas wanted to ask. His own were lined with paper and cloth, cardboard, anything he could salvage to keep from walking on bare ground. Because the bottoms of his socks had worn out, he had cut them off, but still put on the tops every morning so he'd at least look like he had socks on."
In their jolting, comfortless journey through the world, Thomas and Margaret are mostly left to their own devices, obliged to slog onward as best they can. Their story-arc spirals downward into a sort of picaresque Purgatorio. Fleeing from one false haven to the next, sustained by fading memory and illusory hope, the children become ever more deeply enmeshed in complicated grown-up affairs they understand imperfectly, at best.
This is not a coming-of-age story, properly speaking. But there are episodes of unsettling discovery. When the children find their mother at last, things turn out quite differently than they had hoped. One afternoon she entertains a gentleman caller while the kids, adjured to silence, huddle breathlessly upstairs. Margaret asks her brother:
" 'What's that?'
" 'Something, I don't know.' He dangled over the musty mattress, listening, straining to hear the not unfamiliar rhythmic struggle that was more vibration now than sound to his blood-pulsing ears.
" 'Is that him? Is he laughing?' Margaret asked.
" 'No.'
"Voices gone, all sound ceased. Something cold and dagger-sharp hung in the air. If he moved it would destroy everything. There was only uneasiness, that moment of revelation when all is understood though nothing is known. Yes. Of course. But what? The violation was too vast. It changed everything."
If the Devil is in the details, Morris is a fiend for specificity. Fine-brushed images glow on every page. The letter in a lost mother's handwriting, ink smeared, hidden in a tobacco pouch behind a box of rusted cans. The old man's waxy yellow skin and painful wheezing that, "instead of being pitiable . . . was repulsive, creepy the way it emphasized the great effort it took to wage such cruelty." The vase of withered roses, brown petals fallen to the tabletop, the water brackish and cloudy. From a thousand such tiny strands, convincing in their very banality, the delicate fabric of this novel is woven.
Morris's plot, with its twists and reversals (too many and too exciting to recount here), feels tragic in its inevitability. And yet, to the reader's amazement, its message is ultimately redemptive and affirming. This may be the saddest story ever to have a happy ending. It surely is the quietest, subtlest novel that ever kept me up into the small hours of the night, unable to look away. •
Richard Grant's novels include "Rumors of Spring" and "In the Land of Winter." He lives in Maine.
