Louise Erdrich on Novels of Parentless Children
Lately, the writer Louise Erdrich—whose newest story collection, “Python’s Kiss,” is out this week—has been reading books about children who have lost their parents. As she explained recently, these books examine questions of rootedness and inheritance in roundabout ways. In illustrating the results of cutting children off from their parents, they are also reminders of the urgent stakes of a world descending into chaos. “We are on a precipice,” Erdrich said. “One thing that I think reverberates throughout these books is, What happens to the children?” Her remarks have been edited and condensed.
Kin
by Tayari Jones
This is an incredibly beautiful novel that follows two female friends from childhood into young adulthood, during the fifties and sixties. They call themselves “cradle friends” because they’ve known each other since they were born. Both lose their mothers: one is abandoned, and the other has a mother who is murdered.
The central question at the outset of the book is, Is it better to have a living mother who you might one day find, or to have one who is irrevocably gone? Which is worse? As the novel follows the two women through life, it examines how their losses haunt them each in different ways.
I just talked to Tayari, and one thing we discussed was how risky it can be to alternate between voices, like she does in “Kin,” where the two main characters take turns. I find that, if you get used to one narrator at the beginning of a book, your heart kind of skips a beat if you have to change to another perspective. But it really works here. Each of the characters has a very distinctive voice that you want to follow, so you’re willing to go along with it.
The Death of the Heart
by Elizabeth Bowen
I read and reread this novel. It’s one of my favorite books. Bowen was an Anglo-Irish writer who was born into the gentry, and whose mother died when Bowen was thirteen, after which she was brought up by her aunts.
Something similar happens to Portia, the main character of “The Death of the Heart.” Her mother dies when she is just on the cusp of being a young woman. She’s handed off to live in London with her half brother, with whom she’s not particularly close, and his wife, who thinks Portia is strange and despises her for it. Neither of them really acknowledges her grief, which is very much still present. Portia’s memory of her mother is so strong. She will fall off into a reverie where she feels like she’s in Switzerland or some other place they had been together, and it’s clear that she still feels very close to her mother, even though her mother’s not there anymore.
Every word, every description, in this book is so considered, so precise. It just stabs at you. And Bowen has a masterful ability to give us both Portia’s innocence and a sense of how people who grow up without their parents don’t know how to grow into their emotions. Their feelings are murky and nameless.
Austerlitz
by W. G. Sebald
The main character in this book is a man named Austerlitz who was sent to Wales as a child, on a Kindertransport, and who, as an adult, begins to reconstruct what happened to his mother from memories of when he was four years old. It is a novel, but it also reads, in a strange way, as though it’s a memoir, or nonfiction, because there’s so much history in it.
Sebald structures the book in a winding way that reflects the process of Austerlitz’s search, in which he often gathers clues in the form of sensations. He was raised under a different name, and he only learns his real one by accident. He’s an architectural historian, so space is very important to him. At one point, he enters a train station, this enormous vaulted room, and he feels that he has been there before. Finally, these meanders take him to his former nanny, Vera, who can tell him what happened. And what he finds out is that his mother died in Theresienstadt.
As with the narratives in “Kin” and “The Death of the Heart,” the loss of Austerlitz’s parents has left a void that must be filled. People who’ve lost a parent who they never really knew will often see those parents as guiding presences, as faultless, as people without the imperfections and inevitable failures of the parents that we do get to know. And that’s a haunting tragedy, because when you don’t know those failures, you’re not really grieving a real person, but a kind of ethereal presence.