Damage done
Are the sins of the child also the sins of the parents? Lynn Steger Strong’s haunting debut novel explores what happens when a troubled teenager makes a devastating error, which sends the lives around her into orbit.
Strong reveals her story in two extraordinary points of view. First is Maya, mother and Brooklyn English professor, desperately trying to hold her family together — and failing miserably. Second is Ellie, Maya’s sweet, sad, tragic daughter, who becomes more troubled as the novel progresses.
Strong slowly and assuredly unfolds how these two forces work against each other. Ellie has emotional problems, fueling herself on drugs, being sexually promiscuous and acting out in all sorts of ways until she ends up in rehab. We know from the first pages that Ellie has done something terrible, something tragic, but as Annie, Maya’s close friend, suggests, Ellie’s not the only one who is culpable. And that’s the great mystery and beauty of the novel.
Strong’s characters are achingly detailed, and undeniably real, as they all struggle to make sense of Ellie’s fracturing. Desperate to be good (“If she could stay always 200 feet away from the people she loves, maybe then she won’t hurt them.”) and unable to stop her bad behaviors, no matter what she does, Ellie fumbles through her life. Maya’s son, Ben, has always been bonded to Ellie, calling her when he’s tripping or for advice, but when she becomes unmoored, he’s so lost that he drops out of college in Ohio and takes on a job as an assistant coach. This is much to the displeasure of Maya’s husband, Stephen, who feels academic excellence is of prime importance in life.
But Stephen has his own issues. As Ellie moves in and out of rehab, the stresses work on his marriage. Maya begins sleeping alone, beginning to loathe the very things about her husband that had drawn her to him. He’s suddenly too cold, too in control, but Stephen points out that that is what she wanted. “The thing you hate about me?” Steven tells her. “It’s something you created. We created it together.”
Ultimately, it is Maya’s story that helps us understand just how completely the past can be prologue. Abandoned by her own mother when she was little, and overburdened by her father with his own desperate longings and needs, Maya grows up uneasy about attach- ments. She marries Stephen, who seems exactly what she needs — he’s cool, composed and in charge — and they have kids.
Determined to give them the nurturing and attention that she was denied, she soon tumbles in love with both Ellie and Ben, only to soon feel overloaded and frantic with motherhood. To rescue herself, she takes off on her own, or locks herself away in a room from them, agonizing over the damage she must be causing, but unable to do anything about it.
Unable to cope with Ellie, and seeing the rest of her family fraying at the seams, Maya believes she has the solution. She’ll send Ellie to her old friend Annie, a onetime high school student of Maya’s whom Maya bonded with and helped. Annie’s said that her young son, Jack, has been having problems, acting out, and she suggests that Ellie could come down to Florida and take care of him. But Maya makes a terrible, unforgivable error, deliberately leaving out the most important point: Ellie is not responsible. And then, in the steamy Florida sun, something awful happens. But who really is responsible and why?
At times this profound novel is maddening. Withholding information does build tension, but Strong parses out hers so slowly that readers might feel impatient. We learn immediately that Annie hasn’t pressed any charges, but we don’t know what the charges are for, or what happened, until the very last chapter of the book, which for all its power still feels a tad manipulative.
Also, the tragedy rests on Maya not telling her best friend how bad a risk Ellie is — not giving a hint of a warning, which seems unbelievable, especially since Maya is beginning to see troubling similarities between herself and her daughter.
Still, Strong’s story is provocative and her language is eloquent and full of surf, sand and salt spray, as well as the sights and sounds of Park Slope: the “screaming of a baby through an open window, a car horn … baking bread.” We come to know these characters — and care deeply about them.
“Hold Still” is a heartbreaking look at the damage parenting can do, passed down like genetic code anyone would do anything to break. Is loving as well as you can ever enough? As this unsettling debut shows, the answer might only be maybe.