Seeking freedom from her past

“I wasn’t old but I wasn’t young. At almost forty, I was statistically smack in the middle of my life ... “ The opening scene of Nora Eisenberg’s novel “Just the Way You Want Me” takes place in New York in 1992. Betsy Vogel, the engagingly candid narrator, is hearing her lover, David Kahn, offer her exactly the kind of commitment she’s dreamed of, with “just the touch of irony you want in a man declaring his undying love in the last decade of the twentieth century.”

But Betsy feels unable to go ahead, because she is still troubled by unresolved issues dating from the middle decades of that same century, the McCarthy era. Her father, Sam Vogel, a carpenter by trade, was a union organizer who refused to sign a statement declaring that he was not a member of the Communist Party. Although sympathetic to communism and the Soviet Union, Sam Vogel, in fact, was not a Communist: He was too much a free spirit to submit to Party discipline.

As he saw it, Sam (who had given his daughter and son the names of Betsy Ross and Tom Paine) was behaving like a patriotic American in refusing to sign a statement he believed infringed on his right to freedom of thought.

Sam’s defiant attitude led to time in jail and a life lived more or less on the run. Betsy and Tom saw him only rarely when they were growing up. Their mother, Marie, eventually cracked under the strain. Living in a halfway house, where Betsy visits her, Marie is still convinced, even in 1992, the FBI is shadowing her. Sadder yet, she often accuses Betsy of being an enemy agent out to poison her. Betsy and Tom have been brought up by their Aunt Elsie, Sam’s sister.

As far as Betsy and Tom know, their father died in 1972, although neither of them saw him buried: Aunt Elsie told them it would be best for each of the survivors to mourn in his or her own way. So when Betsy’s supportive fiance, David, advises her to visit her father’s grave to pay her last respects before starting a new life with him, Betsy is shocked to find that no Sam Vogel is buried in the cemetery.

Finding out the true story is no easy matter. And even with a fiance as considerate as David, Betsy fears she may be risking her future happiness by embarking on what threatens to be a long and possibly fruitless quest to find out what happened to her father and, indeed, whether he may be alive after all.

The novel’s suspense is contained in its later sections as Betsy and her brother travel across the country to uncover the secrets of their father’s hidden past. But some of Eisenberg’s liveliest writing can be found in the early section describing Betsy’s disappointing career as a writer and editor for Big Apple, a would-be trendy New York magazine she has come to despise.

Eisenberg has a sharp eye for the ways in which people manage to deceive themselves, as in Betsy’s rueful account of how she decided to work for Big Apple’s editor, Alan Marcus, because she admired his collection of Japanese tea bowls: “No matter that Alan’s eyes jumped and his mouth ran. The discriminating man who owned those bowls, who chose them and lived beside them each day, would emerge in time.”

Eisenberg is also familiar with the foibles and self-deceptions of the leftist circles in which Sam Vogel made his name, and she portrays this milieu with a mixture of satire and affection.

Readers familiar with “The War at Home,” Eisenberg’s self-described memoir-novel that was published last year, will be struck by the similarities between the works -- but also by the differences. Both deal with the travails of a dysfunctional leftist family in New York in the 1950s.

In both cases, the mother is a free-spirited modern dance teacher with an unpredictable husband and two children, a boy and a girl. But unlike Sam Vogel, a flawed but charismatic idealist who works for social change, Ralph Lehman, the father in “The War at Home,” is a frustrated, violent man who fought Nazis and Fascists in World War II but whose postwar political activism consists of seeing every employer as the enemy, railing against his children as bourgeois “lumpens” and beating his wife for not being as tidy a hausfrau as his mother.

One could say that the courageous, altruistic father in “Just the Way You Want Me” is an idealized version of the father in “The War at Home.” Not that Sam Vogel is all that idealized: Eisenberg deftly portrays the drawbacks of a man so intent on serving his cause and demonstrating his principles that he sacrifices the needs of his wife and children.

The novel’s ending, although in some ways strained, provides a sense of restitution that mitigates but cannot compensate for the losses that this family has sustained. The miasma of suspicion, mistrust and fear that shrouded them in the 1950s has lifted, but the damage has been done.