Orchard in the Head

The dozen stories of Steven Varni’s “The Inland Sea” are meant to comprise a novel but read more like a troubled memoir. They are grouped, in reference to William Blake, under the headings “Innocence” and “Experience.” The stories follow the life of Vincent Torno, the youngest of three children of an Italian American family living in the semi-rural San Joaquin Valley. Vincent’s boyhood, spent roaming undeveloped land and family orchards, could be the stuff of a childhood idyll. But the land is marred by its inhabitants--a polluted canal is the town’s defining feature--and Vincent’s family life follows his mother’s mental illness, a cycle of upheavals and nervous calms.

In the first stories of this collection, Vincent is a boy of 8 or 9 who is mystified by his mother’s unpredictability. These are tender accounts that establish both Vincent’s love for his mother and his increasing struggle to understand her irrational behavior--which, though never named, suggests manic depression. In the opening scene, Vincent is reading aloud to his mother, Lucy, at the kitchen table. She marvels over her son’s reading ability and then whispers to him conspiratorially that his father will be taken away by ambulance that night. This image of a mother breaching a child’s trust and confidence by drawing him into her own vengeful fantasies is a powerful one, and we might expect the stories that follow to be similarly heart-wrenching. But Vincent is soon more frustrated by his mother than he is disappointed, and the fact that she is only one of several people and situations that enrage him diminishes the impact of an otherwise poignant theme.

In the second story, “Heroes, Bravery, Great Feats,” it is Vincent’s father who is responsible for his unhappiness. The first sentence states that Vincent “spent much of his childhood wishing he could have a different father.” Paul Torno is a driven man who praises the virtue of hard work and is prone to violent emotional outbursts, which his wife easily and at times deliberately provokes. Vincent would prefer a parent like the avuncular Father Faolin, he says. The priest pays a friendly visit to the Torno household early in the story and manages to embarrass Vincent’s father, something that leaves a lasting impression on the boy. Father Faolin returns at the end of the piece, and we are told that his visits to the Torno house bring a sense of levity; “years later Vincent would think of these evenings--not the tense stressful trips to Disneyland--as the only vacations his family ever had.” But they were brief; Vincent’s father “strictly enforced his bedtime.” This story is one of the book’s most problematic and forms something other than the neat cause and effect related above.

The incidents with Father Faolin bracket another story that is unrelated to the priest or his visits--that of Vincent’s first true friend, Hammy Oakes, and that boy’s puzzling and dogged loyalty to Vincent. The heroes, bravery and great feats of the title refer to Vincent’s image of himself and Hammy and to the shooting medals that Hammy steals from his father to give to Vincent. Hammy’s father is mean-spirited and physically abusive. Paul Torno’s strict enforcement of bedtime rules pales next to Will Oakes’ rumored threats to use his guns on his own family. Consequently, Vincent’s lament about his bedtime and the “constricting sense of fear and duty and guilt” in the Torno household ring hollow.

Most of the stories similarly rage against a perceived injustice--Vincent’s having to work for his father’s business, his family’s unfamiliarity with great literature--in an unchecked stream of bathos. Vincent bemoans his father’s stubborn authoritarianism, but the reader sees a man who perseveres in the face of his wife’s emotional swings and inexplicable actions--like purposely overdrawing their bank account or filling the backyard shed with food and clothing, causing an infestation of rats. He endures her retreats to bed and her many hospitalizations, during which he and the older children conspire to shelter and encourage the young Vincent. There is much call for sympathy in these accounts, but Vincent is only one of several who deserve it.

Children suffering the consequences of a mother’s mental illness is a potent theme. Recent novelists who have carried it more successfully include Peter Hedges in “An Ocean in Iowa,” in which the mother is tragic-comic but a clear focus of a little boy’s determined love and affection. Joy Nicholson’s “The Tribes of Palos Verdes” also features a mother who has become monstrous with her own self-obsession and destroys at least one of her children, while the darkest depiction in recent years has to be New Zealander Kirsty Gunn’s “Rain,” in which the mother’s self-centeredness and self-pity leaves the children to a tragic fate. All of these authors evoke both a child’s acute longing for maternal comfort and the cruel disappointment of discovering that longing can never be satisfied.

The stories of “Experience” see Vincent in college and afterward, struggling to write fiction. They are punctuated with trips home, news of the physical frailties of his aging parents, the death of his father and the new development in Vincent’s old neighborhood. Through it all, Vincent sees his family through the prism of self-absorption. At one point he tellingly describes himself as being “at that age when . . . [we] believe in our own uniqueness . . . and thus that we are blessedly exempt from all circumstances affecting others. . . . “

First novels have a habit of focusing on adolescence and a certain amount of angst. “The Inland Sea” is no exception, and the emotion never matures beyond an adolescent bitterness and scorn for the difficulties and obligations of familial relationships.

The “inland sea” refers to the ancient seabed that lies beneath the San Joaquin Valley, and Varni’s descriptions of the landscape are the most absorbing passages in the book. As Vincent reflects on that landscape, particularly in recalling times spent among the orchard trees, Varni’s prose takes on a less stinging, more genuine tone. Indeed, the most intriguing aspect of Vincent’s character is the fact that, as he says, “I had whole orchards in my head . . . trees were the chief inescapable feature of my childhood landscape. . . . I had not only raked and played in their leaves, climbed . . . and once even napped in their limbs, but I had trimmed their branches, felled them whole . . . shaken and knocked their nuts and picked them up. . . . [A] walnut tree’s catkins were as familiar to me as my own fingers.”

There are other instances of fine writing, but they are lost in waves of overwrought prose that struggle to convey the frustration of being born to Paul and Lucy Torno. One yearns for the authorial distance, or novelistic development, that will confer insight into the characters who surround and annoy the protagonist. Vincent’s real problem is not that he feels exempt from these people and their circumstances but that he thinks he should be.