Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved ***

What I Loved is the story of a friendship between two couples. The four of them are artists and/or academics who live in the same SoHo building and have sons at about the same time. We learn about Bill's art, Violet's book about hysteria, Erica's article about Henry James, and also about the couples' summers in Vermont and the boys' sibling-like bond.

The first half of the book feels very much like a conversation you'd have with a friend, catching up on the latest news about them and their families without any expectation of a narrative arc. The second half finds the couples dealing with tragedies involving their sons. The narrator's son dies in an accident at summer camp; the other couple's son shows escalating symptoms of an anti-social personality.

My reaction to What I Loved is similar to my reaction to previous Hustvedt novels.  She creates full-bodied intellectual characters and a realistic milieu, but her stories lack narrative drive. As Leo says about Lucille's poetry in this book:

I began to understand that the tone of the work never varied. Scrupulous, concise, and invested with the comedy inherent in distance, the [book] allowed no object, person, or insight to take precedence over any other. The field of the [author's] experience was democratized to a degree that leveled it to one enormous field of closely observed particulars - both physical and mental (p 177).

For example, in one scene our narrator visits a psychologist to discuss Mark, the anti-social teenager:

I talked about my anger, about feeling betrayed and the uncanny effect of Mark's charm. ... Through the window in the room I could see a small tree that had begun to leaf. The broken knots in its branches would later become large blooms. I had forgotten the name of the tree. I looked at it in silence after telling her about the friendship between Matt and Mark and continued to stare at it, searching for its identity as though its name were important. Then it came to me: hydrangea.

Leo's distraction adds a level of realism to this scene but also detracts from the main point. I felt the same way about the elaborate descriptions of Bill's projects and the subplots involving the main characters' parents and siblings.

Hustvedt's realism falters in the final section of the book when she introduces an outlandish character (Teddy Giles) and sends Leo on a melodramatic mission to help Mark escape from his clutches.