In ‘Beautiful’ debut, sisters bound by illness

No man is an island, as the poet says. To be human is to bond, and to bond is to share — happiness and plenty, but also hardship and misery. We are all at the mercy of the people we love, whatever misfortunes they meet or bring upon themselves.

That’s the power of family, awful and wonderful, and this power ripples through Mira T. Lee’s extraordinary debut novel, Everything Here Is Beautiful (Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, 368 pp., ★★★g).

Lucia Bok is a magnetic woman who approaches life with a sparkling grandiosity, childlike and impulsive. Born and raised in America, the second daughter of a Chinese immigrant single mother, she departs from the more conventional path of her older, more responsible sister, Miranda.

After spending her early 20s indulging her wanderlust in Latin America, Lucia falls in love with Yonah, a middle-age, semi-illiterate, one-armed, huge-hearted Russian Jewish immigrant who owns a health food store in New York’s East Village.

Within the first 10 pages, Lucia and Miranda have lost their mother to cancer, and Lucia has married Yonah at City Hall, Miranda their only witness. Not long after, Lucia starts losing her grip on reality — an episode of the incurable mental illness that will plague her adult life. Yonah and Miranda clash over her treatment, but are united as family in their love for Lucia.

When Lucia decides she wants a baby, she leaves her unwilling husband and meets Manuel, a younger man from Ecuador. She becomes pregnant, and Manny becomes family, tied to Lucia and her illness through their daughter and his stolid sense of duty. Lucia moves frequently: from home to hospital, from country to country; sometimes with family, sometimes alone. She battles her illness while trying to be a good mother, to live a fulfilling life.

Meanwhile, Miranda builds her own life. The sisters find bitterness and distance between them, even as Miranda remains on call, in constant fear that “the line between her sister and the illness was becoming irrevocably blurred.”

The novel covers decades at a swift clip, but it never feels rushed or lightly explored. There’s a lifelike texture to the fast passage of time, each relationship painted with deep, efficient strokes. Lee is a cogent, controlled writer, hitting big themes while avoiding the usual traps of mawkishness and emotional manipulation. (The one misstep being the neat little epilogue.)

“This is not some fairy tale,” says Miranda. “Things don’t turn out okay just because you want them to.” Beautiful is no fairy tale. It springs from the rich mess of love and pain and humanity, the restlessness of real life that ensures nothing is fixed ever after.