‘The Erratics’ Remembers a Mother With a Monstrous Talent for Twisting Reality

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/books/review-erratics-vicki-laveau-harvie.html

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Ancient glaciers did not travel alone. They carried within them pebbles, rocks, even boulders, sometimes for hundreds of miles. These migrating stones, once deposited, are called “erratics” — they stick out among their new surroundings. When the Cordilleran ice sheet worked its way down the mountains of Alaska and across western Canada, it melted to reveal a trail of angular stones now known as the Foothills Erratics Train.

This was the stark terrain of Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s childhood in Alberta. The wayward pebbles and stones provide the title of her memoir — “The Erratics” — and its enigmatic, anchoring metaphor. It is the first book by Laveau-Harvie, 77, and the winner of Australia’s Stella Prize.

Who is the “erratic” of this desolate story of dysfunction, in which the author returns home to care for her aging parents? Is it Laveau-Harvie’s mother, an unpredictable creature of florid narcissism and dangerous persuasion? “She is a kind of flesh-and-blood pyramid scheme, a human Ponzi,” Laveau-Harvie writes. “You buy in and you are hooked. You have an investment in believing the projections, the evangelical 3-D laser image of personal power and aggrandizement, this illusion of depth in thin air.”

Her mother breathed lies. She would invent family members on a lark, and kill them off for sympathy from the neighbors. To get out of a teaching job she no longer wanted, she successfully faked her own death. She manipulated with ease and evident pleasure — and no one quite so efficiently as Laveau-Harvie’s father, who remained besotted with her, chief acolyte to her delusions.

Laveau-Harvie fled home as a young adult, moving first to France, then to Australia to work as a translator and raise a family. (Is she the erratic, given how far she wandered?) The book begins when she learns her mother has shattered her hip, and she and her younger sister return to the “House of Loony,” their fortress of a home on the bleak Canadian prairies. “In winter the cold will kill you,” she writes. “Nothing personal.”

At the hospital, they unwind the web of lies their mother has been spinning to the staff — that she has 18 children, that Laveau-Harvie is wanted by Interpol. In frustration, Laveau-Harvie’s sister takes their mother’s medical chart and writes “MMA” — for “mad as a meat-ax.” The writer worries: “Maybe they’ll see that on the chart and give her some medication called MMA and kill her.” Her sister responds: “Do we care?”

Sorting through the house, they discover their mother has been squandering her savings, sending it to scammers. They find their father disoriented and skinny as a scarecrow — brainwashed, Laveau-Harvie writes, and starved by their mother. The sisters feed and bathe him, console him as he pines piteously for his wife. Keeping the couple separated is imperative, the sisters decide, convinced that their mother will kill him if she returns. They push for their mother to be given a diagnosis of dementia, even as the doctors protest that she is competent.

For such a force of menace, Laveau-Harvie’s mother is a strangely silent antagonist. Once placed in care, she vanishes from the story; the focus shifts to the father — depicted as a helpless, blameless lamb — and the vulnerabilities of old age. The mother is so absent, I began to wonder if Laveau-Harvie still fears her contaminating charm, her ability to distort reality.

In one scene, a conference is held to decide on the mother’s future. In any other book, it might be a pivotal moment — with the main players assembled, the mother primed for attack, her freedom in the balance — but we get a vague sense of events. The writer confesses that she has no memory of what was said. She recalls only the “quaking, liquefying dread” of being near her mother. At the first sight of her mother, in fact, Laveau-Harvie’s sister tries to run: “She wheels around like a horse catching the scent of a bear upwind and I grab her arm. Don’t move, I whisper. It’s OK.”

She can describe her mother’s handwriting, however: “all confident pointed flourishes, a martial-art-weapons script.” And she prowls among her possessions, her fur coats and china. She dips into the past to present a few examples of bizarre behavior — how her mother once crept up behind her and snipped off her ponytail with a pair of scissors — but there is no full accounting of what it was like to grow up with such a woman, no interest in exploring the sources of her cruelty. As a choice it is unsatisfying, but also curiously mesmerizing: the mother as the glacier, the great governing force in their family life, and still too dominant, too vast to be seen whole.

In its compression and odd omissions, its reluctance to diagnose, this memoir is itself an erratic — an outlier in its genre. Think of the the vivid portraits of the confounding mothers in Mary Karr’s “The Liars’ Club,” Alison Bechdel’s “Are You My Mother?” and Jeanette Winterson’s “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” Those stories are ledgers of silences, persisting confusions and, at times, outright abuses. They are narratives of the mother-daughter bond that rummage deep in the past and carry into the present, as the writer interrogates what it means to wrest possession of the story. “My mother composed me as I now compose her,” Bechdel writes.

How moth-eaten “The Erratics” appears in comparison — and yet, how intriguing is its approach. Laveau-Harvie’s gaze repeatedly curves away from personality to place — to the setting of her childhood: the ice age that deposited the Foothills Erratics Train, the torn wood inlays and cluttered floors of the dilapidated family home, which she navigates, high-stepping, “like a Lipizzan dancing horse,” wondering, with frantic paranoia, if her mother has arranged an ambush. She cannot travel without noting potential fault lines and grinding tectonic plates, without wondering about the water table or dilating on the black earth near active volcanoes — “the lava cooling but still hot and dangerous, just a crust on the top, nothing you would really want to put your weight on. You could drop through into the molten surge below.”

Laveau-Harvie depicts her mother neither as a riddle to be solved nor as a woman to be understood, but as an implacable act of nature, who must only be survived. If she remains a hazy character in the book, she inflects its every sentence, its structure, its aversions. She was a mother with a monstrous talent for twisting reality. In her memoir of the aftermath, her daughter tethers her story to the very ground beneath her. She speaks only of what she can confirm; she moves carefully, finding her footing.