It’s All in the Family in These New Novels From Veteran Authors

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/books/review/count-the-ways-joyce-maynard.html

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COUNT THE WAYSBy Joyce Maynard

LORNA MOTT COMES HOMEBy Diane Johnson

Reading a family novel offers a tried-and-true method of dead reckoning with the family we didn’t choose — a means of measuring our own trajectory beside the quandaries of others navigating family dramas.

This summer brings two new domestic sagas by veteran novelists: “Count the Ways” from Joyce Maynard and Diane Johnson’s “Lorna Mott Comes Home.” Set in different centuries, some 30 or 40 years apart, both novels cut across moments of national and personal upheaval to examine the complex web of family against the backdrop of history.

Maynard’s novel, set in the 1970s and 1980s, toggles back and forth between past and present. Her story plays out against the history that most immediately affected private lives — identity awakenings, AIDS, violence against women, marital betrayal, the space age, the dawning of the computer age. Jump ahead a bit to the Great Recession of 2008 for the historic backdrop of “Lorna Mott Comes Home.” America in this period is a very a different one from Maynard’s — more high-flying, more accepting, greedier, less idealistic. But for all the changes, families are still doing their family-thing as they have for millenniums — falling in and out of love, getting into trouble, getting out of trouble, having babies, loving then hating then loving some more. For the two families in these novels — both white, both comfortably situated, separated by time — we see, despite the unique and lively differences in setting and detail, how everything and nothing has changed for this subset of the American family.

Maynard’s “Count the Ways” is the story of Eleanor, a children’s book writer, mother of three, ex-wife of Cam. The novel opens with our protagonist’s return to the farm she once lived on as mother and wife, before life tore the family apart. The occasion for the return is the wedding of Al, Eleanor’s firstborn, who is a transgender man. As the wedding day unfolds, the past occupies most of the novel’s space — describing how Eleanor grew up, married, divorced and found her way through her parents’ early death, a rape, her marriage to Cam, her life in the country, her young son’s tragic accident, her divorce, her affairs, her husband’s affairs, illness, family rifts, her friendships, her thriving career.

The pacing is swift and the plot turns seem authentic to this billowing, blustering family, which propels the story along. “If you had told Eleanor this would be part of her family’s story — the child she had thought of as her daughter, who had sent her a letter to say that he was actually her son — she might have imagined this as their family’s central challenge.” Eleanor’s life has many bigger challenges than Al. In fact, his happiness as a man offers consolation for all the pain thrown her way from elsewhere. Ache, resignation and a stalwart determination to move forward are captured in the earnest and crisp tone of Eleanor’s voice.

Johnson’s “Lorna Mott Comes Home” features the eponymous main character returning from France to San Francisco and a life she left some 20 years earlier when she married Armand-Loup Dumas, a Frenchman from the small village of Pont-les-Puits. Obama is now president, the country is in the midst of the epic housing bust, and Lorna, in her late 60s, a granny on the verge of a second divorce, is determined to start again: “She would prove, to herself if to no one else, that you can make a new life at any age.” This kind of vow, which we see valorized everywhere in contemporary culture, is tested by the many family intrigues to which Lorna returns. Her plan is to resurrect her career as an art historian, writer and lecturer. Reunited with her grown children, she discovers layer upon layer of familial intrigue that interrupts her plans for a new awakening.

An almost picaresque cavalcade of family dramas unspool: Her youngest son embezzles money and disappears in Thailand; she suffers financial setbacks; her daughter and granddaughter also struggle with money. Lorna’s first husband, the father of her children, married now to a wealthy woman, has the potential to solve many of the larger family woes. But that easy solution is not forthcoming. Their teenage daughter, ill with diabetes, upsets the apple cart when she becomes pregnant. This is followed by the head-spinning revelations.

There are many turns of events that eventually lead a fair number of this ever-swelling group back to France for the birth of the baby and a reunion with Armand-Loup. For all the twists and turns in Lorna’s domestic life, her crew takes it all in stride and doesn’t seem terribly disturbed by the ugly hand of fate. Though there are many points of view in the novel (which frequently lends a repetitive quality to the storytelling), Lorna’s is the most captivating. She is cheeky and has a buoyant sense of humor that grounds the dizzying pace of events. “Next to the voluptuous Madame Trebon, Madame Lorna looked like a slightly desiccated sprite, seeming young until you looked more closely; then you thought, Young for her age.”

The jacket copy for “Lorna Mott Comes Home” says the novel captures the way we live now. But, as we all know far too well, the way we live now is uncharted compared with 2008 — and with 1975. The historic periods of both novels appear far in the rearview mirror in the wake of a global pandemic, the financial ruin of so many, the immediate urgency of racial reckoning. But there is comfort to be found in the familiar dissection of family — in how we navigate the unhappiness that family, and life, throw our way, and by this measure these two novels offer solace and hope.