USA TODAY International Edition
Love and belonging at root of ‘ The Children’s Crusade’
The Children’s Crusade, Ann Packer’s absorbing novel about a California family, is suffused with parental love. Not the baby- powder- smell- and- miracle- of- life kind, but the accepting, cherishing substratum beneath daily snotty noses and endless lunchmaking kind — and in turn, the love of children for their parents: demanding, scrutinizing, helpless. The love that in its presence, or absence, shapes a family.
A mother’s determination to re- create herself as an artist provides the drama, but the heart of the story comes from the father. Bill Blair is a doctor who retrains as a pediatrician because after two years in the Korean War he can identify a gunshot wound just from the sound of the groaning.
He then becomes a wise, loving father who is extraordinarily attuned to his four wildly different kids. He’s upright, patient, thoughtful and sensitive — too much so, really, but let it slide — except when it comes to connecting with his wife, Penny.
Penny Blair’s story is one shared by many women in the 1970s, when much of the novel is set: a woman who has grown up believing that marriage and motherhood would bring happiness discovers that is far, far from the case. She takes what to her are necessary steps to find purpose and fulfillment as an artist. She takes over a storage shed at the edge of the family property, turns it into her studio and gradually spends more and more time there.
“You can have an idea that is so important, you have to act on it or you’ll … you’ll die,” she tells her family. “What good would I be to you if I began to shrivel? I have to keep myself alive so I can help you live. It’s not just doctors who do that.”
If we’re not as sympathetic to Penny’s desperate drive as we might be, it’s because she doesn’t appear to be conflicted about emotionally dumping her children, kids whom Packer shows are interesting, lovable and resourceful. The novel really centers on Robert, Rebecca, Ryan and James, whose odd- man- out status is confirmed by his lack of a name that begins with an “R.” It is their bafflement, grief and an-
ger as they are confronted with her disappearance that is foremost.
The framing device of the book is the adult James’ return home to tell his siblings, still settled in Palo Alto, that he wants the four of them to sell the family home, which they have hung onto after their father’s death. A large, loud, wild child, James “often caught himself partway through a statement or action only to realize that continuing might mean undesirable consequences. Typically this happened too late to abort the whole thing but too early to proceed without feeling guilty or stupid. This annoyed him great
ly.”
He grows up with a belief in his own unworthiness and a hunger to belong, whether it’s to the Benedictine monks who run a nearby boarding school or an “intentional community,” a kind of non- residential commune, in Oregon.
Like the California live oak tree in the Blair family’s yard, a symbol to Bill of potential happiness, the novel spreads its branches widely. Each of the four siblings narrates a chapter. The three older siblings end up as a physician, a psychoanalyst and a teacher, and we meet spouses, children, colleagues and tenants.
The book’s best parts are those about the Blairs as children who navigate with and around each other and the world. They angle for their parents’ attention, try to manage emotional currents they can sense but not understand. It’s those fully formed heartbreaking portrayals that makes the troubles of the siblings as adults, and James’ ultimate fate, so moving.