Family Matters

THE CURE FOR GRIEF

By Nellie Hermann

Scribner. 272 pp. $24

I admit to having had misgivings as I cracked the ominously titled The Cure for Grief. Another autobiographical novel by a young author about a child recovering from family trauma. To up the emotional ante, the kid's father is a Holocaust survivor.

But Nellie Hermann's first novel is proof that in the hands of a skillful writer, the most familiar themes can still surprise us with their potency and truth.

One reason The Cure for Grief succeeds so well is that it concerns a very particular family, the Bronsteins: a strict but tender Jewish father, "the kind of man who could not conceive of a joke going unacknowledged," who barely remembers yet carries with him his early years in a Czech concentration camp; a mother who converted from Catholicism to marry her husband and, as her children well know, can "detect lies as if they were curls of smoke"; and three brothers with distinct personalities and relationships to their sister, Ruby, the youngest child. Each chapter of The Cure for Grief is a self-contained slice from a stage in Ruby's life, filtered through her eyes.

The Bronsteins' happy if sometimes fractious life in a Boston suburb is visited with tragedies as relentless as the afflictions of Job. Ruby, only 9 when The Cure for Grief begins in 1987, struggles to make sense of the brutal changes in her family as one brother develops schizophrenia and two other family members are diagnosed with a fatal illness. She responds by dividing herself in two: "the Ruby at home and the Ruby elsewhere; the Ruby who saw sad things and the Ruby whom the world saw." She participates in spelling bees, goes to summer camp and junior prom, smokes pot and blushes with first love, but she also puts off any kind of reckoning with the griefs that pile up over the years.

Hermann portrays the relationships among the Bronsteins in prose that is unsentimental but unfailingly attentive, so that we too feel the losses when they come. Ruby looks up to all of her brothers (they "were most of the reason she was who she was"), but she also feels like a tag-along sometimes. She is the baby of the family and a girl. She's particularly close to Nathan, the youngest of the three, who's so endlessly entertaining that when it's his turn to wash the dishes, she volunteers to dry, just to be around for his antics.

The Bronstein parents, too, are fondly drawn, particularly in a chapter devoted to a trip to Czechoslovakia when Ruby is 14. Her father is finally ready to return to the land of his birth and internment at the concentration camp in Terezin. The tension between him and his wife comes to the fore -- most notably in an argument that is and is not about consulting a guidebook -- but so does their love for each other. It's a wonderfully complex chapter that is also a meditation on memory and the role of identity in a family.

The Bronsteins are compellingly portrayed as a family that is not particularly devout but in which religion plays an important role. Ruby remarks that her father's Judaism "had made her mother into the committed Jew that she was; it was an accepted part of all of their lives, and yet there was little talk of God, or really of belief at all." Later in the book, Ruby convinces herself that "God had forsaken her father once already in his life, God had forsaken her father and her grandfather and the Jews. He would not forsake him twice."

The final chapters are Hermann's least successful, in large part because they are the most internal, ranging over Ruby's memories and her self-realizations ("She must take hold of her feelings, that much is clear," etc., etc.). These sections prevent Hermann from using her gift for telling details and observations to the full, and some of Ruby's epiphanies sound pat. Perhaps most unfortunate is the inclusion of a prologue that anticipates a key event at the book's conclusion and robs that climactic moment of its oomph. (These prologues that tease us with a hint of what's to come seem to be the vogue, but generally they're a gamble without a jackpot, signaling that the author doesn't quite trust the power of her story or her readers' concentration.)

Why do bad things happen to good people, to our people? And how are we survivors to go on with the business of living without forgetting the dead? These questions are old. But Ruby's search for her own answers and her struggle to reconnect are moving and surprisingly suspenseful. Now that Hermann has worked through her childhood, it's worth watching to see where she applies her considerable talents next.

-- Sarah L. Courteau , literary editor of the Wilson Quarterly.