A front page article in today's New York Times, "Loving and Leaving America," gave me a jolt of reminder that I haven't yet written about a debut novel I finished last week that blew me away. Lisa Ko's (http://lisa-ko.com/) "The Leavers" is an incredibly sophisticated, slow moving examination of the nuances of being an immigrant, or being born to one, in the United States today.
The voice of young Deming Guo will stay with you for a long time. Conceived in China, born in a sweat shop in New York City, then returned to China to live with his grandfather for five years, he is brought back to the United States by his mother Polly, after her father dies and she has exhausted all other options. Completely unequipped to mother a five-year-old, hiding from immigration authorities, Polly lives with her boyfriend, his sister Vivian, Vivian's son Michael, and Deming in a three room flat in Chinatown.
Ko wisely creates a seemingly unsympathetic character in Polly, at once lavishly loving and cringingly selfish, Polly is a schemer who doesn't plan to settle. She has brains, ambition, and dreams of a better life, one that frightens her less ambitious lover. When she disappears without a word, friends believe she's off to Florida to begin work managing a nail salon.
"She'll be back," they all assure Deming. But how, he wonders, could she leave without even saying goodbye?
That question will haunt him for years. His search for answers will haunt readers who recognize that this scenario is playing out every day on the streets of our country as ICE cracks down on undocumented immigrants, breaking up families, and wrecking havoc on the psyches of the legitimate children left behind.
Eventually social services arrive and Deming Guo, a Chinese American boy, is adopted by a well-meaning but emotionally distant couple who believe that the best way for Deming to assimilate, far from the city that he loves and the only people he knows, is to become Daniel Wilkinson, all American boy. And Daniel tries, he really does. He wants to please but there's a rebellious streak there, perhaps a bit of his mother? There's also a raging anger against the woman who left him and nowhere to place that ire except against himself.
Just when you think your heart will break for Daniel and the road to self-destruction that he's on, just when you think you want to throttle Polly for pursuing her own dreams without thought to Deming's wellbeing, Ko reveals Part II of her book and we are treated to another entire novel told from Polly's point of view.
Nothing is black and white in this remarkable novel. Polly is complicated, her actions certainly worthy of analysis. But when you read her story you will, hopefully, be loath to judge. Lisa Ko has written a beautiful book about the plight of immigrants but offers no simple solutions. Awarded Barbara Kingsolver's Bellweather Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, this book begs to be discussed by socially engaged readers.
Whenever I'm looking for a respite from the deep, dark literature that is my forte, I turn to authors who made me feel good in the past. Do you remember the delightful book, "Pay it Forward," by Catherine Ryan Hyde that became a foundation ( http://www.payitforwardfoundation.org/ )and a film? Well, Amazon was offering some great deals on e-books for the kindle so I bought one of Hyde's newer novels, "The Language of Hoofbeats," hoping for a boost of endorphins. Though I had issues with parts of her book, it generally satisfied the "feel good" criteria.
Do you know, live with, or work with a person whom you might describe as having gotten up on the wrong side of the bed? You know, the one you can't speak with until noon for fear of reprisal or the one you finally eliminate from your roster of friends because he or she is just too much of a downer? Now just imagine if you knew someone who was BORN on the wrong side of the bed! Think about how difficult it would be to even live with oneself in that condition, let alone to maintain relationships.
Ms. Hyde brings two such characters together in this novel that touches on several difficult themes, grief, mental illness, foster parenting, and the incompetent family court system. Paula and Jackie Archer-Cummings are a married lesbian couple who complete their family by adopting or fostering emotionally troubled children, one of whom, fifteen-year-old Star, suffers from severe anger issues.
They've recently relocated to central California where Paula, the bread-winner, will take over an established veterinary clinic. Their only neighbors, Vernon and Clementine (the other character who is always angry), have a horse, Comet, who appears to be suffering from neglect. Perfect, you might say. A vet in one house and a horse in need next door. But no, it's soon obvious that Clementine wants nothing to do with the new neighbors, and the more she avoids them, the more their lives intertwine.
In alternating chapters, short, conversational, and easily and quickly read, Jackie and Clem verbalize their inner angst as they each try to negotiate their new realities, Jackie's as a stay at home mom to three step kids, and Clem's as a lonely, soon to be divorced, sixty-something curmudgeon longing for connection but terrified to articulate it.
Against Clem's wishes yet seemingly powerless to stop it, the unmanageable Star sneaks out each night, letting herself into Comet's corral, to groom and minister and communicate with the lonely horse. One night, when she can't stand herself another minute, Star breaks open the corral and rides Comet out into the night and, in an instance, the relationship between Clem and her new neighbors rises to an entirely new level.
Catherine Ryan Hyde is, according to her website, an avid equestrian and it shows in her loving attention to the bond between Star and Comet. It's obvious that she fervently believes, as do I, in the power of a healing language between animals and humans.
Where the novel could use improvement is in the disappointingly one-dimensional characterization of the couple, Paula and Jackie. It's especially surprising since their children, Quinn, Mando, and Star, are so much more complex and fun to be with. A mild quibble to be sure for a great beach read that you can finish in a day and bookend with the more difficult stuff.
