Sisters try to heal childhood wounds
Laura Zigman offers a modern take on the bonds of sisterhood in “Small World,” a novel about siblings whose difficult childhood has morphed them into emotionally challenged adults who lack the ability to have normal relationships.
Joyce and Lydia Mellishman, 50-ish divorcees, are living together in Joyce’s Cambridge apartment after Lydia, who lived in Los Angeles for 30 years, decides to move back East.
Joyce works from home, digitizing photos for family legacy projects. She’s fascinated by what she thinks are “normal” families, and wonders, “How come I didn’t get to grow up like that?” But Joyce knows the answer, as does Lydia: Once there were three Mellishman sisters, but Eleanor, who had cerebral palsy, died when she was 10. Joyce also lurks in “Small World,” her neighborhood’s social networking site, turning posts about lost cats and missing wedding rings into prose poems. For Joyce, dwelling in “Small World” is “easier than being in the real world.”
Socially awkward Lydia, like Joyce, knows that when Eleanor was alive and after she died, she and Joyce were always “silent bystanders” in their parents’ lives. Their mother ignored them while Eleanor was alive, and after she died, Louise turned her attention to helping other families like theirs.
Joyce and Lydia have a chance to reckon with the past, but when new, noisy neighbors move into the apartment above them, they focus all their energy on the mysterious sounds coming from above and delay, consciously or unconsciously, confronting the multilayered grief that has stunted them since childhood.
Zigman’s tenderly told novel is a realistic rendering of what it’s like to care for and love a disabled child, and the toll that love takes on parents and siblings. It’s also about the bonds that sisters share and how, in the case of the Mellishmans, unresolved grief nearly breaks them. As grim as this novel sounds, it’s laced with the promise of a brighter future. — Carol Memmott, Minneapolis Star Tribune
V.V. Ganeshananthan knows how to grab
the reader’s attention and hold it in her propulsive second novel, “Brotherless Night.”
“I recently sent a letter to a terrorist I used to know,” begins narrator Sashi, reflecting on the events that led to her exile from Sri Lanka in New York City. Sashi then reflects on the meaning of the word “terrorist”: “We begin with this word. I promise that you will come to see that it cannot contain everything that has happened.”
Everything is the Sri Lankan Civil War (19832009) between the Tamil Tigers and the government’s Sinhalese majority forces. Everything is also the story of Sashi’s family, members of the Tamil ethnic minority, and how they have been torn apart ‘Brotherless Night’ By V.V. Ganeshananthan; Random House, 368 pages, $28.
by the war and the events leading up to it.
As a young high school student, Sashi dreams of testing into medical school, like her beloved older brother Niranjan, and his best friend, called K. Sashi sees education as a way to make a place for herself in a society where active discrimination by the government against Tamils is legal and an everyday part of life for Sashi and her family. Still, Sashi’s days are filled with love for her parents and four brothers, and a secret longing for the handsome, kind and brilliant K.
However, after a riot that ends in Niranjan’s death, two of Sashi’s brothers and K join the Tigers, a Tamil separatist group, in an act of idealism, hoping to protect their families and their communities from further violence.
Sashi herself goes on to medical school, where she is asked by the Tigers to help in their cause. But as years of war unfold, acts of violence lead to cycles of retribution, and tragedy for all.
Riveting, heartbreaking and extraordinary for both its empathetic gaze and its clear-eyed depiction of the brutality of war, “Brotherless Night” is a masterpiece.