A Lyrical Testament of Heartbreak and Loss

Certain books are so authentic in their voice and so vivid in their characters that the age-old speculation regarding events that are lived and reported versus events that are imagined and dramatized feels completely irrelevant. Offered as a novel, Anitra Sheen’s “Things Unspoken” has a loose structure of connected interludes or vignettes (they aren’t quite stories) and a heartbreaking immediacy more commonly associated with memoir. It is simply but beautifully composed. Its point of view--that of an adult woman standing close to, but not often intruding on, her younger self--reflects a deep understanding of the way a child experiences loss and grief and the severe behavior of the powerful adults in her life. This is storytelling that speaks the truth on nearly every page.

The narrator, Jorie Mackinnon, is the youngest of three children who grow up in 1950s Los Angeles in the Hollywood Hills. Her brothers are Alex and Jimmy. Her mother, Therese, is a gifted musician whose death, from poliomyelitis, consigns the children to an emotional desert ruled by their father, Tom, a doctor, who is the centerpiece of this book, an enigmatic specimen under constant study by his watchful daughter and sons. Tom’s children long for his presence, his attention, some--any--expression of his love, but it is not forthcoming. He believes that actions are what matters; “Love,” he tells Jorie, “is just a word. Overused at that.”

Tom’s coldness and strangeness are wholly plausible, yet wholly horrible at the same time. He never asks where the children go and often disappears himself for several days running. He allows the house to remain unfurnished, dirty and meagerly stocked with food. Regarding their mother’s death, he says it was inevitable, which means, “You must accept it”--nothing more. And he has a secret life that, when revealed, is quickly hidden from sight again. “There was nothing, it seemed, that could not be ignored.”

The Mackinnons embody the truth that all families, seen from the inside out, are odd, but they are decidedly odder than most. Their eccentricity, a quality we tend to think of as likable and amusing, suggests that true eccentricity originates in disturbance and comes at great emotional cost--to children in particular.

The story in “Things Unspoken” is not shaped, as in a conventional novel; as in life, it merely accrues. Vivid episodes alternate with more ordinary ones. The children run through housekeepers like paper towels. They end up getting by, and only that, with Jorie doing minimal cooking and cleaning. They have no relatives, no friends, no ordinary family pastimes; instead, they read encyclopedias, dissect cats and grow up fundamentally unparented. As Jorie comes of age, she is pursued by a lecherous priest and falls into an affair with a colleague of her father’s; Tom, in his sickbed after a heart attack, does nothing to intervene or to express concern.

As Tom grows still more ill, he decays in both mind and body and reveals a further darkness to his personality. In an imaginary letter to Alex, who has by then run away, Jorie hears herself saying, “I can only tell you what happened at the end. I know what happened. I don’t know why.” Indeed it is one of the accomplishments of Sheen’s book that she does not try to explain the disturbed Tom Mackinnon other than to suggest--during the family’s only vacation, to Canada, where Tom grew up--the troubled nature of his childhood, which was itself dominated by his unforgiving, icy father, Ewan.

Speaking of the roses that grew on the wild hillside behind their house, Jorie says that her father “admired beauty that cropped up under unlikely circumstances, as if the very unlikeliness of it was the essence of its value.” The same might be said of Sheen’s book: coming out of so much pain, so much beauty is unlikely. It is also a vindication and a memorable piece of work.