Coming of Age in a Bohemian Family

Almost all coming-of-age novels--whether told from the point of view of a child or an adolescent--face a fundamental problem. If the narrator is psychologically insightful and linguistically sophisticated, she often sounds like an adult. But if she is unambiguously and realistically young, she is often either inchoate or cutely naive--the literary equivalent of a primitive painting.

Sarah Willis’ debut novel, “Some Things That Stay,” is not entirely successful in solving this problem, but Willis errs on the former, which is to say the right, side of the equation. In Tamara Anderson, her 15-year-old narrator, she has created an astute protagonist who, through the strength of her voice more than through the details of her story, remains consistently compelling. This is not a novel that will revolutionize the coming-of-age genre--it may be both impossible and unnecessary to do so--but it is quirky and believable, and it illuminates that time of life when, as Tamara observes, one is “a traitor” to one’s own desires.

Set in an upstate New York town in 1954, “Some Things” covers four tumultuous months in Tamara’s life. Her bohemian family--headed by her father, Stuart, an artist--moves to a new town every year (over Tamara’s fierce and furious protests), for Stuart requires the “growth” that only new scenery can provide. Her mother, Liz, is a rationalist and a free spirit whom Tamara reveres and resents. The family is rounded out by Tamara’s two younger siblings whom she openly, and refreshingly, despises. Tamara has an all-too-clear take on her family’s hierarchy of love: “My mother loves my father, more than us, more than herself, and he loves her, even more than art, so I forgive him his trespasses. He loves us, too, but we come after art.”

Though Stuart adores Liz, he doesn’t quite see her. And what he doesn’t see, most of all, is that Liz--beautiful, energetic, creative Liz--is “fading like cloth in the sun.” In fact, Liz is dying--something that the dangerously solipsistic Stuart does not notice until, wracked by tuberculosis, she is committed to a sanitarium. It is Tamara’s attempt to understand her mother’s absence--as a punishment, as a test, as divine justice, as a curse, as a liberation and a condemnation--that is the real subject of this novel.

Helping--and confusing--this struggle are the Murphys, the family across the road whom Tamara befriends. (“We are smarter, they are poorer,” Tamara observes.) While the Andersons are staunch atheists, Helen Murphy is suffused with the grace and the passivity of the deeply religious--both of which Tamara finds hugely attractive. Willis expertly charts the way religion can seduce a lonely child--”I like the way Helen talks about my soul, as if it’s something she loves”--and the vain and futile ways in which Tamara tries to bargain with God as the price for her belief. Willis is equally adept at describing Tamara’s first, joyful sexual encounters with Helen’s younger brother Rusty: “I want this kiss to be a one thing, not a many thing,” Tamara reasons. “I remember one things better, like the one firework I saw. . . . [T]his kiss I will keep separate from the rest.”

As Liz worsens, Tamara’s dislike and distrust of Stuart grows. And though her family’s crisis does provide Tamara with a new understanding of her parents, “Some Things” resists an easy, sentimental resolution. In fact, what Tamara comes to is not a cuddly embrace of her family but, rather, “a clear sadness” that she “can examine, understand,” which is surely the beginning of wisdom. It is not by chance that Willis takes the title of her book from a poem by Emily Dickinson, who once wrote that the first thing to stay is grief.