A sweeping yet intimate look at the forces that shape one family’s history
‘Life is damage,” Claire Messud observed in a 2022 interview when asked about themes she revisits in her work. Messud’s remarkable latest proves her point. “This Strange Eventful History” — the Guggenheim recipient and Harvard professor’s seventh volume of fiction — is an epic exploration of a family’s long and often tortured history. Though the novel is both sweeping and intimate, spanning seven decades and six continents, from World War II through the aughts, Messud’s piercing interiority keeps the focus tight, gaining the reader access to her characters’ innermost thoughts. Her attention to detail, memory, and foreshadowing suggest the influence of Tolstoy and Proust, but what’s most evident as we turn the novel’s 400-plus pages is the sense that we are engaging with work that is extraordinarily personal to the author.
There’s a reason for that: The fascinating — and singularly dysfunctional — family about which Messud is writing is her own. In portraying the Cassars, Messud hews closely to a 1,500-page “family history” her grandfather wrote and bequeathed to her. The novel is narrated from the points of view of a cast based on her grandfather, her father, her mother, her aunt, and the author herself.
In the prologue, Chloe — Messud’s stand-in — sets out Messud’s intention in penning their saga:
“I’m a writer,” Chloe observes. “I tell stories. Of course, really, I want to save lives. Or simply, I want to save life.” Those opening sentences conform to what Messud has publicly said about literature’s power and the writer’s responsibility: that “it is the job of a fiction writer to ask ‘what are the consequences of how we have lived.’”
Gaston Cassar, the family patriarch, sets aside his writerly ambitions to become a naval officer and later a businessman. His peripatetic life often separates him from his family or takes them to far-flung corners of the globe, but what keeps him on solid ground is his devotion to his wife, Lucienne — 15 years his senior. The two are deeply in love, but share a shocking secret that is revealed in the book’s final pages.
Gaston and Lucienne’s son, Francois (modeled on Messud’s father), is anxious and brooding but highly intelligent as a boy. From Algiers he travels to Paris to study, but finds the environment punishing, and has a breakdown. He dreams of living in the United States, a goal he ultimately achieves, winning a Fulbright Fellowship and admittance to Harvard. Always restless and rarely comfortable with his place in the world, when he meets Canadian Barbara, he hopes their relationship will cure his loneliness.
But their marriage is not a harmonious one. When Francois’s work takes him to France and then Switzerland, the two are apart for months at a time, Barbara caring for her ailing father in Toronto. Francois writes to Barbara of his desolation, and while she feels pangs of guilt, she increasingly resents Francois’s self-absorption. Though she attempts to assert her independence by pursuing a career of her own and pushing back against her husband’s volatile temper, she never fully succeeds. And when Francois’s alcoholism threatens to kill him, Barbara stays by his side, their “dance of domestic tension” keeping them tethered:
“they’d grown together like Baucis and Philemon; no matter the bitterness, they couldn’t be separated now.”
Of all the voices in the novel, Chloe’s is the clearest. Despite having moved from continent to continent as well, she exhibits little evidence of dislocation. She’s inherited the Cassar intellect and appetite for literature and philosophy, but without the accompanying baggage. She finds a partner who is her equal, and fulfillment as a writer and teacher. And she’s come to terms with her parents’ flaws. While Chloe and her sister, Loulou, are by their parents’ sides at the end, they haven’t sacrificed their autonomy in the process.
The most moving and astute of the novel’s scenes occur beside hospital beds or when one of the characters contemplates mortality. Barbara compares her father-in-law Francois’s dying process to childbirth, “that other time at which portals between life and death were flung wide... when her brain, her will, her dignity were suddenly irrelevant, herself a puny buoy on the tempest-tossed ocean of animal imperative.”
Tolstoy famously wrote in “Anna Karenina” that “happy families are all alike,” but “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Sometimes, though, unhappiness has to do with what is universal, and this is what Messud is especially adept at conveying. Gaston, who has witnessed much over the course of his existence, begins to feel — as all who live to old age inevitably will — that “the world had transformed around him, and he couldn’t seem to adapt. As if he’d learned to play the violin — not just play it competently but to make the instrument sing — and had suddenly been called upon by the conductor to switch, in the middle of the symphony, to the bassoon.”
In writing this breathtaking ode — and lament — of a novel, Messud honors her ancestors by interrogating the circumstances that shaped them and the questions that plagued them. As she wrote in “Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write”: “Our human passion for storytelling — not simply for sharing information, but for giving meaning and shape to events — has motivated individuals and armies… stories have held up a mirror and taught us who we are and what we believe.” It is in this spirit that Messud gifts us with her family’s journey.
THIS STRANGE EVENTFUL
HISTORY By Claire Messud Norton, 448 pp., $29.99