BLOOD TIES
Jennifer Lash
Bloomsbury USA ($24.95)
Even after so many 20th-century writers and critics have torn the cloak off of "realist" fiction, exposing it to its own unrealistic assumptions and offering alternatives in structure and language, a strong crop of straightforward, character-driven, Victorian style novels continues to grow, reflecting reader's seemingly endless hunger for family dramas that focus on the day-to-day, or, as one of the characters of "Blood Ties" calls it, "all that crap about kith and kin." Following in the tradition of George Eliot, Henry James and even D. H. Lawrence, Jennifer Lash exposes the complicated ways in which people continue to frustrate their relations with the world and each other. Through this desperate story of everyday disasters -- from unwanted pregnancy and sexual repression to child abuse and alcoholism -- Lash traces an inheritance of lovelessness and despair that flourishes from one generation to the next, mutating and persisting as it goes.
As the book travels back and forth from rural Ireland to working-class England, Lash assumes a liberal approach to perspective, allowing herself a look into the mind of any character at any given moment. She dips in and out as she chooses, one moment revealing the hidden fantasies of the secretly gay Cecil, for instance, then turning to the pent-up hatred of his wife, and on to the improper yearnings of the parish priest as he discusses with them the absolute necessity of banishing their ill-begotten "sexual deviant" son from the community.
Lash excels at concretizing the complicated whirling workings of her character's minds. The battles between reason and emotion, confidence and doubt, self-preservation are rendered in obsessive detail that draws the reader right into the maelstrom. Lash has a meticulous, almost cold command of her world -- much like her protagonist Violet, who is strong, commanding, and emotionally remote -- but Lash steps far enough away from the situations portrayed to give us the follies with sympathy, even if without mercy. "Blood Ties" is bleak all around: when love and redemption come, death follows. And while the book slips into predictably melodramatic plot twists at times, it maintains a consistency in character and tone that bolsters it till the end.
Lash, who wrote "Blood Ties," her last of seven books, while dying of cancer, takes to the realist novel with palpable urgency. Her passion for material infuses the writing with energy and precision, rescuing the novel from its own mundanity. Humanity itself is at stake here, she seems to be saying, and if we're to understand each other, if we're to break the terrible patterns of brutality and hopelessness, we better listen closely. A certain faith is promulgated by such a book, the faith that love and kindness can make all the difference in whether a person will go on to a life of bitter destruction or find a way to live productively. And if this seems simplistic, Lash proves otherwise, using this novel as an argument for the absolute necessity of balance between reason and compassion.
By Carolyn Kuebler