‘Golden’ reveals tarnished truths
Very different twins harbor resentments
The title of Claire Adam’s emotionally potent debut novel, “Golden Child,” (SJP/Hogarth, 288 pp., ★★★☆) is deliberately ambiguous. At the heart of the story are twin 13-year-old boys living in rural Trinidad. Which one, we’re meant to ask, is the sun shining on?
Peter is polite and studious, destined for scholarships (one called a “Gold Medal”) that can provide him with a ticket off the island. Paul, who was born choking on his umbilical cord, has grown into a wild-haired, rage-prone, slow learner nicknamed Tarzan. Their father, Clyde, can’t help but favor Peter, having decided that Paul is irreparably damaged. “He sees himself walking to the gates of the mental hospital with two children, and sending one through the gates,” Adam writes.
As the novel opens, the imagined separation has become a real one: Paul has gone missing. Clyde’s wife, Joy, attempts to be a calming influence – a recent home-invasion robbery has traumatized the household. But for Clyde, Paul’s disappearance stokes long-simmering resentments and fears. A laborer, Clyde has never measured up to the success of one brother-in-law, a prominent judge. He’s harangued by another relative who’s upset at an inheritance Clyde received. And the news is filled with stories of gangland kidnapping and murders that dial his anxiety up another notch.
“Golden Child” isn’t thick with the rich sociopolitical detail that marked the work of Trinidad’s most famous novelist, the late V.S. Naipaul. Yet with a spare, evocative style, Adam (a Trinidad native) evokes the island’s complexity during the mid-’80s, when the novel is mostly set: the tenuous relationship between Hindus such as Clyde’s family and the twins’ Catholic schoolmaster, assassinations and abductions hyped by lurid media headlines, resources that attract carpetbagging oil companies but leave the coun-
try largely impoverished.
“It is like there are two islands, Clyde thinks, one for people who understand about these things, and another for people who don’t understand.”
“Golden Child” mostly operates on an emotional plane. Adam shifts on occasion into Paul’s point of view, revealing how badly Clyde has underestimated his son’s intelligence. What Clyde and others dismissed as evil spirits or mental illness is mainly fear and shyness. (With perhaps a touch of dyslexia: “Sometimes the letters all arrange themselves and make sense, and other times they just look like ants crawling around on the page.”) Paul is more emotionally alert than anybody has given him credit for.
That failure of compassion makes the novel all the more bracing in its closing chapters, which reveal the truth about
“It is like there are two islands, Clyde thinks, one for people who understand about these things, and another for people who don’t understand.”
Paul’s disappearance and Clyde’s agonizing decisions in response to it. Clyde’s headstrong rationality leaves a deep wound in the family.
“You see this country?” Clyde says. “It’s impossible to live a decent life in this country.” The island Adam describes is indeed an often brutal place. But her novel suggests we be alert to how of many of those challenges we conjure up ourselves.