The Sorrows of an American

books:

	• The Sorrows of an American: A Novel Siri Hustvedt Henry Holt and Co., 2008 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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Introspective and Smart

The writing was exceptional. The bulid up to the end was disapointing. I expected a more dramatic ending. I thought about the book way after I finished it. There were subltlies in the telling of the narrative that were complicated at times but thought provoking. I enjjoyed reading about the Norwegian culture of the midwest.

Family History

Just This Side of Madness

This is a complex novel that reads like a literary mystery and at other times like a psychological drama. Everyone in the book hovers at the edge of the abyss. Even the mild-mannered, kind psychoanalyst, Erik Davidsen, who narrates the story which takes place in the year following the death of his father, Lars. Excerpts from Lars memoir appear occasionally: descriptions of his service in World War II or at his Norwegian family's farm. Interestingly, Siri Hustvedt states in her acknowledgments that they are nearly verbatim quotes from a journal by her own father, who died in February, 2003.

There is an engaging plot and suspense, but what makes this novel stand out is its intellectual clarity and prowess. I find the word "American" in the title ironic as I felt throughout my reading that the book was written by a European and I kept picturing London instead of New York, where it is set. This was because the book totally lacks a certain cultural element that is typical of American fiction: a kind of sentiment, or faith or anti-intellectualism. This novel is very interior, clinical and mentally disciplined. At times it read like a Bergman film, full of secrets and repressed emotion, characters haunted by past experience, yet never sentimental or romantic. The book's European intellectualism and lack of American surface-as-story romanticism is articulated by one of the characters, Inga, Erik's sister. She is describing a former actress who had an affair with her husband. Inga tells Erik that the actress had been an alcoholic but recovered by getting involved in New Age ideas. "She touts that half-baked, naïve, shiny American brand of mysticism, you know, Far East via California and Hallmark..." But what, I wondered, is both "half-baked" and "shiny"? The element mercury comes to mind and in fact is descriptive of American culture: amorphous, quicksilver fast, directionless. This quality is embodied in another character, a young hip New York artist, Jeff Lane, who documents everything with a high-speed digital camera, intruding everywhere, immortalizing the banal, he is a walking blog with spiky hair. But as he says of life, "The world is going virtual anyway."

As in every novel set in New York recently, there are frequent references to 9/11, but they are peripheral to this story which is primarily about the psychoanalytic approach to awareness. In fact, it could be an advertisement for psychoanalysis in that the brief case-histories narrated by Erik always show the analyst as deeply attuned and insightful, and the process of analysis as producing remarkable breakthroughs, lifting years of depression or allowing patients to experience a "reincarnation" in this life. If this novel veered into romanticism at any point it was its seeming faith in psychoanalysis.

There is much that is thought provoking and intriguing in The Sorrows of an American. It's a fascinating read.

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The Sorrows of an American

From page 11: "When my great-grandfather Olaf Davidson, the youngest of six sons, left the tiny farm high on a mountain in Voss, Norway, in the spring of 1868, he already knew English and German, and he had his teaching credentials. He wrote poetry. My grandfather would finish the fifth grade."
This is the first novel I have read that was written by Siri Hustvedt. I bought it after reading a review, I remember, said something about "immigrant experience". I liked it and related to the many human experiences told in the lives of the characters. Erik, a psychiatrist, living in Brooklyn, his sister and teenage niece in post 9/11 Manhattan, his new tenant whose parents are from Jamaica - their stories and sorrows are told by Erik in parallel to those from another time and generation captured in the voice of his late father's diary entries.
What kept me reading were the diary entries. This is from page 20: "A depression, he wrote, entails more than economic hardship, more than making do with less. That may be the least of it. People with pride find themselves beset by misfortunes they did not create; yet because of this pride, they still feel a pervasive sense of failure. Bill collectors earn their living by demeaning and humiliating people with pride. It is their ultimate weapon. People of character become powerless. If you have no power, all talk of justice is just so much wind. The consoling argument that everyone was in the "same boat" had only partial validity. Farmers who entered the depression free of debt may, in fact, have increased their assets by buying up cheap land and farm machinery at dumping prices. During these years farmers went up or down. We went down."
Every subplot and patient history is a nugget for reflection and these will keep you returning over and over for a second and a third time.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

The Sorrows of an American is a soaring feat of storytelling about the immigrant experience and the ghosts that haunt families from one generation to another

When Erik Davidsen and his sister, Inga, find a disturbing note from an unknown woman among their dead father?s papers, they believe he may be implicated in a mysterious death. The Sorrows of an American tells the story of the Davidsen family as brother and sister uncover its secrets and unbandage its wounds in the year following their father?s funeral.

Returning to New York from Minnesota, the grieving siblings continue to pursue the mystery behind the note. While Erik?s fascination with his new tenants and emotional vulnerability to his psychiatric patients threaten to overwhelm him, Inga is confronted by a hostile journalist who seems to know a secret connected to her dead husband, a famous novelist. As each new mystery unfolds, Erik begins to inhabit his emotionally hidden father?s history and to glimpse how his impoverished childhood, the Depression, and the war shaped his relationship with his children, while Inga must confront the reality of her husband?s double life.

A novel about fathers and children, listening and deafness, recognition and blindness; the pain of speaking and the pain of keeping silent, the ambiguities of memory, loneliness, illness, and recovery. Siri Hustvedt?s exquisitely moving prose reveals one family?s hidden sorrows through an extraordinary mosaic of secrets and stories that reflect the fragmented nature of identity itself.

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