Tale of Family’s Brutal Turmoil

WISH YOU WERE HERE

A Novel

By Stewart O’Nan

Grove Press

518 pages; $25

Stewart O’Nan built his reputation on novels that temper the creepy paranoia of early Stephen King with a Dostoevsky-esque approach to character development. Fast-paced, suspenseful and claustrophobic, O’Nan’s novels--including “The Speed Queen” and “A Prayer for the Dying”--pivot on complicated moral questions, life-or-death matters rooted in the irresolvable depths of his characters’ histories.

When they’re not off getting themselves killed, the fleet of troubled misfits who populate these books are busy knocking off other unfortunates or obsessing over the deaths that occur in their vicinity. For O’Nan, American films and novels, filled as they are with bloody and unspeakable acts, reflect “our real lives,” he once wrote in an essay. Violence is nothing extraordinary.

In his latest novel, however, O’Nan seems to have heeded the cries of those who lament the brutality that permeates pop culture.

Eschewing both the violence and the labyrinthine plotting of the early novels, “Wish You Were Here” offers a stark and brilliantly mesmerizing glimpse into the lives of the Maxwells, the most aggressively average American family this side of “The Corrections.” OK, there’s a slaying (really a disappearance), but it’s relegated to the background.

The real meat of the matter is the obscenely dull stuff of daily life: sandwiches, laundry, weather, car rides. Not since Jane Austen has a writer devoted so many words to the minutiae of a card game.

The Maxwells have gathered for a week of inner tubing and bickering at their summer cottage on Lake Chautauqua, a resort area that hit its prime sometime around 1880. Likewise, the Maxwells themselves have seen better days.

One year prior, Henry, the “steady and stoic” patriarch, died quietly in a Pittsburgh hospital, leaving the cottage to his fussy, abrasive wife, Emily. Like Franzen’s Enid Lambert, Emily is a mix of Depression-era stinginess and provincial small-mindedness who can’t quite adjust to the accoutrements of 21st century life.

Confused by self-adhesive stamps, fast-food restaurants and digital animation, she’s utterly baffled by her two grown children, Meg and Ken, who allow their kids to drink Kool-Aid for breakfast and play video games day and night.

Equally exasperated with their mother’s endless nitpicking, Meg and Ken have sorrows that go beyond their father’s recent death. Not long out of rehab, Meg smokes dope daily--”[a]t first she’d thought marijuana maintenance was an AA joke”--when she’s not sobbing about her imminent divorce (her husband left her for a young blond) or snapping at her kids, Sarah, a 13-year-old seductress, and Justin, too timid and frightened for his 10 years. Ken, “the good son,” has quit his company job for an $8.50-per-hour gig at a photo lab, which will allow him to focus on his photography. (That his wages allow Ken, his wife Lisa and kids Ella and Sam to live in Cambridge, Mass., adds an absurdist touch to this neo-realist novel.) Of course, he’s so worried about money that he can’t pick up his Nikon without second-guessing his aesthetic instincts.

As Emily tried to shelter Meg and Ken from the gravity of their father’s illness, so do they attempt to hide their own problems and embarrassments from her. Of course, as the week wears on, Meg and Ken spill. And Emily has her own secret--the reason she’s decided to sell the Maxwell cottage, despite the objections of her children and Arlene, Henry’s spinster sister. She feels that Emily has no right to the family house.

Structured around the passage of time--rather than a conventional narrative arc--”Wish You Were Here” is divided into seven sections, one for each day of the family’s week. Each section contains a number of short chapters, which follow the characters as they go about their business: Sarah develops a crush on a neighborhood boy, while her cousin Ella falls hard for Sarah, struggling not to kiss her as the two lie in adjoining sleeping bags. Ten-year-old Sam, a budding sociopath, taunts sweet, gentle Justin. Arlene and Meg trade confidences and smokes. Ken prowls around with his camera, fixating on a local girl who’s been kidnapped from the gas station where she worked. Emily worries over garbage pick-ups and breakfast dishes. And Lisa--barely tolerant of the family’s “annual melodramas”--does her best to avoid Emily, hiding with one of the kids’ Harry Potter books and contemplating life’s dullness, having “nothing to occupy her mind but their problems--common enough, and stultifying, since she saw no improvement ahead, let alone real solutions.”

The joy of the novel--and O’Nan’s triumph--is the subtle manner in which the alternating voices draw in the reader. You read on less to find out what happens to the Maxwells (there’s really no question; their fates are fixed in stone), than to become better acquainted with the characters, whom O’Nan makes fascinating and familiar. Here are “our real lives.” Yet the dismal deaths in his previous books somehow seem less brutal than the slow, measured psychological violence the Maxwells inflict upon each other--violence all the more insidious for being meted out in the name of familial love. What could be more average than that?