Daughter dearest: a nightmare

With “Family History,” a domestic drama about the havoc wreaked on a close, loving family by a teenage daughter whose adolescent misery spirals out of control, Dani Shapiro stakes her turf in the deliberately upsetting but ultimately heartwarming land of Parental Nightmare Fiction. Judith Guest’s version of the parental nightmare in “Ordinary People” is a sailing accident from which only one of two brothers returns alive, leaving the survivor drowning in guilt. Jacquelyn Mitchard’s version in “The Deep End of the Ocean” is a child kidnapped at 3 and found nine years later. Hopeful endings are an essential element of the genre. A drug-addicted adolescent saved in rehab fits the bill, whereas a kid dying of an overdose lacks the necessary redeeming uplift. What makes these carefully orchestrated crescendos of catharsis such effective tear-jerkers is more than just schadenfreude. Reading about the monster lurking in the closet of family happiness is, after all, a way of disarming the ogre and allaying our fears.

The author of “Picturing the Wreck” and two earlier novels, Shapiro is best known for “Slow Motion,” her candid, cautionary memoir about her own personal nightmare. In it, she unflinchingly chronicles the four-year affair she was seduced into at 20 by a rich, flashy, married Manhattan attorney who was the stepfather of her best friend at Sarah Lawrence. Under this sugar daddy’s aegis, she dropped out of college, loosened ties with her Orthodox Jewish family and pursued an acting career while jetting around the world draped in expensive furs and jewels. She anesthetized herself against her compunctions with a steady stream of alcohol and cocaine. Shapiro movingly describes how she started to reclaim her life when she received a call that both her parents were near death after plowing into a guardrail on a snowy New Jersey highway.

Like Kathryn Harrison -- another writer whose early adulthood was marred by an affair with an even less appropriate man (her father) -- Shapiro originally tried to fictionalize her story in her first novel, “Playing With Fire.” (Harrison’s first novel was “Thicker Than Water.”) And like Harrison, Shapiro turned to the unmediated directness of autobiography when she had gained enough emotional distance, established herself as a novelist and was safely married. Harrison’s memoir, “The Kiss,” like her novels, employs an icily gorgeous prose and a detached, almost scientific fascination with creepiness. Not Shapiro’s. In both her memoir and her fiction, Shapiro is an abundantly emotional writer with a deep appreciation of life’s banal blessings.

When “Family History” opens, Shapiro’s narrator, 40-year-old art restorer Rachel Jensen, is in deep despair. She holes up in her darkened bedroom compulsively watching old family videos to see if she can pinpoint the moment when her life went awry. Shapiro eschews timeline chronology in favor of a more complex narrative structure that zigzags between past and present and metes out dramatic details gradually, keeping the reader turning pages. Increased suspense is one advantage of rationing her revelations; the downside is a slow, overly portentous buildup.

We gradually realize that something terrible has happened to Rachel’s teenage daughter, Kate, and her toddler son, Josh. Her husband, Ned, has moved out, though Rachel still loves him. Ned was an artist when he and Rachel met in New York City, but he’s ended up teaching in his hometown, Hawthorne, Mass. Now, fired from the Hawthorne Academy for a reason we don’t learn until Page 193, Ned has reduced his aspirations still further by joining his parents’ local real estate business.

The Jensens’ once happy, athletic daughter turns sullen and contemptuous at 13. Meanwhile, Rachel learns she’s pregnant but unwisely decides not to tell Kate immediately, since her earlier attempts at a second child ended in miscarriages. Predictably, Kate finds out prematurely and feels marginalized. This is one of many misjudgments scattered throughout Rachel’s narrative -- a conventional feature of Parental Nightmare Fiction that allows readers to feel they might have averted the impending disaster with more prudent parenting.

It takes more than half the book to get to the accident in which Kate injures Josh, and still more pages before Shapiro reveals the bombshell that nearly shatters the Jensen family beyond repair: Kate’s hurtful accusation against her father. Shapiro’s method, of course, is to keep upping the ante. First, Rachel is torn between her loyalties to her two children. One child puts the other in grave danger, even if accidentally. How do you cope? How do you forgive that? Then, that same child attacks and endangers your husband. Whom do you believe? Whom do you protect?

Shapiro’s characters have a tendency to hyperventilate under such stress, and so does her prose. Ned isn’t just Rachel’s husband, but “the man I trusted with my whole life.” A life, mind, that “was never going to be the same again. Somehow, I knew it. Whatever had happened, it was all going to be different now.... We weren’t safe, nothing was safe.”

At one point, Rachel criticizes her husband’s early artwork as overly sentimental and earnest: “... the viewer of Ned’s painting could never quite enter the painting, because the work itself seemed to be emoting; it was too full of feeling to allow anyone inside it.” Is this Shapiro’s veiled self-criticism, or is it literary insecurity? She needn’t have worried. “Family History” weeps, but it invites the reader to sob along with it. Shapiro is particularly moving when conveying a mother’s physical craving for her children as well as the tentative dance of reconciliation and forgiveness between people who still love and respect each other. What her novel lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in a well-wrought -- if occasionally overwrought -- visceral emotionality.