Book Review : One Family’s Difficulties Seen From a Long Distance Away

Recent History by Annette Williams Jaffee (Putnam’s: $18.95; 288 pages)

The phases of life are quite clear. First you’re a kid and you just have a lot of experiences, some of them good, some bad. Then you grow up and leave home and try to make it out in the world. Usually, there are gains, but also some setbacks. The setbacks weigh heavily.

So you start thinking about your childhood, and how nice everything was then, when you could rely on your parents, and even blame them, when necessary. As part of your adult education, you’re supposed to at some point--usually around age 40 or so--stop blaming them. Now, it gets tougher. You’ve only yourself to account for the state of your life. That’s when you realize, it’s terribly lonely being an adult. You wouldn’t recommend it.

In this novel, the second from Annette Williams Jaffee, the main characters--sisters named Noonie and Rosie, and their mother, Elsa--do not yet seem to have arrived at the point of relieving each other of blame for the states of their lives. Pain and recrimination, confusion, estrangement and anger are the daily bread of this family.

Truthfully, there’s much to be upset about, including a central, devastating deception.

The father disappeared when the girls were small. He went to war and never came back. “Whether this was sheer neglect or lack of good directions or hideous death was never fully explained.” What makes the matter worse is Elsa lies to the children when she claims not to know what happened to him. He is, in fact, alive somewhere. He simply decided that his wife’s family was too much for him to compete with, and he chose not to return after the war.

You’d think that would be enough to set any family off on the wrong course, and it is. But there is more. As Noonie and Rose age, things go from bad to worse. Not even their own deep sibling affection can endure.

Like Snow-white and Rose-red in Grimm’s fairy tales, Noonie and Rosie are opposites. Noonie grows up and marries Gus. Rosie grows up and doesn’t marry anyone because she prefers women, a situation her mother finds appalling. Rosie’s lesbianism also repels Noonie. The result is that the family is rent apart, a daughter cut off. Elsa exercises “the ancient Jewish prerogative of declaring a wayward child dead.” No one speaks to Rosie anymore.

Very early on Jaffee makes an observation about memory and childhood: “What do we remember when we remember childhood, what flavors, textures; an atmosphere sticky with something, not even your own. At some point it stops having to be your own childhood and just the mention of this word evokes those feelings and images.”

The problem here is not with that “sticky something,” the evocation of childhood, which in “Recent History” can be quite haunting. Jaffee is very good at evoking the pale shapes of youth, which jar our own memory.

Rather, the difficulty lies in having created characters whose troubles seem to be reported on, as if from afar, in a strange kind of emotional monotone, made even more distant by the cadence of present tense writing which tends to further equally weight things.

I doubt very much Jaffee meant it to be this way, for she’s a writer with considerable talents. Nor do I think she wants to hear what I’ll say next, but I think it might be helpful, even though it’s only one opinion, so I’ll plunge ahead and offer advice where none was asked for. In future works, she would perhaps be well-advised to leave out the hundreds of sentences she’s chosen to include in parentheses, tacked on to otherwise rather complete thoughts or observations.