Book Review : A Motherless Child Tries to Find Her Way in the World

After She Left by Richard P. Brickner (Henry Holt & Co./A Donald Hutter Book: $18.95)

Though voyages of self-discovery set in New York’s Upper East Side have become a staple of contemporary fiction, there are shoals and narrows in “After She Left” uncharted by previous navigators.

Emily Weil’s mother left on a mission of mercy when her daughters were children, a volunteer in an organization working to settle Jewish refugees in Shanghai. She died of dysentery in a Japanese prison camp, without ever seeing her family again. The news came during the girls’ annual summer holiday at their grandparent’s country house, leaving Emily, the younger child, feeling as if her heart “were being lowered into boiling water” . . . her father’s skin as he relayed the telegram “white and shiny, like a raw potato.”

Though a few healing years have passed by the time the novel begins, a permanent emptiness lingers in the Weil household, aggravated by the elder sister Ellen’s departure for college. At 14, Emily makes a conscious effort to function as her father’s companion, thoroughly enjoying their weekly visits to the theater and delighting in the discussions that follow, coming “away from every play or musical with fresh memories in need of relief, as if her new experience were a rash on her brain.”

Playing a Role

Inevitably, Emily yearns to become an actress, and succeeds in persuading her father to allow her to spend a summer working as an apprentice in a stock company. Could there be a more direct way to play her mother’s role? Emily thinks of the theater “as a body, the aisles as bloodstreams,” a Freudian image if ever there was one. Only 7 when her mother vanished, Emily has never been sure whether she’s the daughter of an authentic heroine or simply an abandoned child. One way and another, her future will be directed by her efforts to find the answer to that question, which lies at the center of the book, affecting every relationship Emily will have in the course of the narrative.

She’s an exceedingly private girl, reluctant to confide her anguished thoughts to friends. Outwardly, she’s indistinguishable from her classmates; inwardly, she’s aware that there’s “a hole in her mind where peculiar thoughts collected,” gory, fanciful notions she keeps entirely to herself. By the time she’s 16 and away on her working vacation in summer stock, she’s become expert at fielding awkward questions about her mother. The veneer has never shown the slightest flaw until Emily attracts the attention of an arrogant young actor.

Pretending to be fascinated by Emily herself, he inveigles her mother’s story from her only to accuse her of inventing the entire episode in order to make herself interesting. Clumsily and brutally, he attempts to rape her, and though she successfully repulses him, and even feels mysteriously strengthened by the experience, the event marks the end of her theatrical ambitions.

Thereafter, Emily’s life follows a more usual course for college English majors. She finds a job in the publicity department of a small publishing house, has the ordinary romantic and occupational adventures of a young woman living on her own in the big city, and quite on schedule, falls in love and marries a young man who seems too suitable to be real. Heir to a prosperous toy business, Steve seems the epitome of bourgeois solidity until a scant three months after the marriage when he decides to quit the toy business for medical school, a quixotic decision that rouses all of Emily’s ambivalence about do-gooders.

The daughter of someone whose altruism ended fatally, she is so appalled at finding herself the wife of another that she divorces her husband after chapters of bitter arguments and mutual recrimination. At this point, “After She Left” seems to lose its edge, becoming a familiar chronicle of romantic disillusion mitigated by growing self-confidence and worldly achievement. Though Emily may never entirely comprehend the complex motives that drove her mother to a supreme sacrifice, by the end of the novel, she has managed to make herself feel both worthy of that memory and free of it.

Brickner’s strength is the minutiae of New York life, so meticulously recreated that the novel all but replaces the Yellow Pages. He’s a realist working in a venerable tradition, involving the reader in lives that not only invite the reader’s identification, but depend upon it for effect. “After She Left” may not whisk you away to strange new worlds, but, like its grand 19th-Century predecessors, it enlarges your knowledge of the one in which most people have always lived.