All in the Family

A dozen years ago, Irini Spanidou published “God’s Snake,” a dark and gleaming novel told through the eyes of a 6-year-old Greek girl. Greek-born and living in New York, Spanidou writes with the lyrical percussion of a poet, but the value of her novel went beyond that.

It was a precious import: That is, it brought us something that our own writers’ individualist preoccupations, whether traditionally cohesive or contemporarily fragmented, do not much provide. “God’s Snake” evokes unforgettably the confluence of the national and the personal, in this case Greece’s harsh character and history and the frailly budding sensibility of one of its children.

A similar confluence is achieved in “Fear,” Spanidou’s second novel. Greek society, with its unmediated voices and its chiaroscuro devoid of softening grays, is a character, as before. The author incorporates with it the bleached landscape, the brilliance of sun and sky, the indoor dankness, the smells of oily cooking, the unbridged hierarchies between men and women and old and young. As for the interlocutor, she is the same girl, this time as 13-year-old adolescent.

It makes a great difference. The child’s eye observing its turbulent world is a fixed point; the adolescent’s eye partakes in the turbulence. The vision wheels in and out of focus; sometimes blurred, sometimes in startling clarity. “Fear” makes remarkable discoveries; occasionally it loses sight of them.

Ana Karystinou is a newcomer to a Salonika suburb. She has been a newcomer all her life; her father, Stephanos, is an army colonel transferred regularly from post to post. The family’s Danish furniture, once chic, has grown shabby and fatigued with the moves. It has been deprived of furniture’s mission to confirm and embellish the continuity of a household. Ana’s mother, Aimilia--an Alexandrian Greek and also chic, once--has lost her own continuity: that of sinking family roots and building on them. She has turned irascible and childish.

The opening passage of “Fear” limns a vivid connection between Greece and Ana, between the forces of society and tradition and the displaced adolescent. It is St. John’s Eve, 1959--the summer solstice--and the neighborhood children are practicing a pagan rite of seasonal renewal: jumping over a bonfire with the chant “I’m done with the bad, I’m new with the good.” Ana hangs back, mocked by the others. She is held by fear, as she will be from time to time over the year in which the book unfolds, but it is fear of a special kind.

It will be elaborated in a scene both brutal and suggestive, when Stephanos returns that evening from his war-college course and sees his daughter by the bonfire. At home he passes his hand unhesitatingly through a candle flame to demonstrate its harmlessness; Ana does it hesitantly and is burned. “It was your fear that burned you, not the flame,” he berates her, seeking to impart a lesson.

Ana turns the lesson and deepens it. She was not afraid of the bonfire but of the act of jumping. Stephanos remembers a paratrooper who stripped off his parachute and balked at the aircraft door. Then suddenly he plunged out of the plane and plummeted fatally to the ground.

“He had been afraid to jump, to risk life. He had not been afraid to die. It is the courage of the weak to welcome death, he thought, staring at his daughter. It is the power of the wounded to welcome pain.”

The relationship between the colonel and his daughter is at the heart of the book, as it was, also, in “God’s Snake.” Stephanos is the Spartan warrior, hardened in a dark ideal of heroism through the horrors of Greece’s civil war. From her babyhood he had tried to breed the same hardness in his eldest daughter, whom he desperately loves. When she nursed, he would sometimes pull Aimilia’s nipple from Ana’s mouth to teach her to struggle and to give in neither to pain nor death.

The portrait of Stephanos is impressive. He is autocratic and even monstrous, yet his love for his daughter is genuine. He is Spanidou’s Minotaur, caught in the labyrinth of Greece’s tragic and intransigent history and knowing (at times he wearies of heroism and longs for simple tenderness) that he is doomed.

From this powerful, near-magical point of departure, the novel takes Ana through her first year in Salonika. It will be her last as well--another transfer--but she will have come some ways toward growing up and away from her family and her fear.

Ana’s adolescent peregrinations are treated with a mix of eloquent insight and a degree of incoherence. Spanidou quite wonderfully instills in her something of her father’s brooding force even as she rebels, first against her mother’s frivolity and nerves and later, once she has found a friend, against Stephanos as well.

Despite her timidity and awkwardness as she enters her first year of high school, Ana is a star pupil from the start. Almost immediately, she hooks up with the school rebel, Vera: glamorous, bright and unconventional. The balance between them is a shifting one: At first it seems to be Vera who takes the lead; later, it is Ana who, away from her father, finds in herself a measure of his implacable vitality.

Spanidou writes evocatively of Ana’s budding sexuality. It is, still, confused: a sudden pleasure in the physical beauty of a garage mechanic; a tentative physical attraction, angrily rebuffed, to Vera. The relationship between the two is a flood at one moment, a dry gulch at the next. There are mutual betrayals and reconciliations and at the end, as Ana prepares for one more move with her family--surer of herself now and no longer quite a subject--a drifting apart.

Spanidou’s portrait of Ana is sometimes indistinct but never indifferent. She haunts us, moves us and convinces us. If we do not always see her clearly, this mainly heightens the image of an adolescent who is a mystery to herself. (Spanidou’s use of a Salonika serial killer--never seen but generating continual rumor and tension--to weigh upon Ana’s fears seems something of an atmospheric manipulation.)

Perhaps the principal weakness in the narrative is the confused and inconsistent characterization of Vera, resonant at times and perfunctory at others. Ana’s alliance with her against the world, and their explorations, quarrels and embraces, sometimes seem unmoored. There is a logic in this: Two adolescents equal two chameleons in mid-shift. To ask what color chameleons are when they embrace is perhaps unreasonable. Still, the reader needs to know.