Customer Reviews

Disobedience: A Novel

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(27)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

The mother, pretending to be the faithful wife she's not, is having an affair, which threatens to divide the family into two.

The sister, pretending to be a soldier she's not, is obsessed with the Civil war, a war that threatened to divide our country into two.

The men in the family observe from the sidelines and wait, paralized, for the women they love to be exposed, for their own fates to be decided, for the delicate balance and unity of the family to return to it's norm. In the midst of looming consequences, both women must discover their true identities the hard way.

We see all this through the eyes of the adolescent son. On the verge of adulthood, he begins to see his parents' flaws in a new, truthful light. We listen to his thoughtful narrative, we observe his actions, and we are there to see how he functions (or doesn't) in his own flawed relationships with his own best friend and his girlfriend. We see his trust in women falter accordingly. We see him forced into a position of power that he doesn't seem to want.

This is not a book that is heavy on plot. It is about the ever-changing relationships and dynamics in a family full of bright, eccentric, intellectual/acedemic people. The novel has a surreal, voyeristic quality that allows the reader a prolonged look behind closed doors (and secret passwords) at a difficult year in the life of this remarkable family. It manages to beautifully weave in so much: war/political issues, gender/sexuality issues, Oedipal issues, identity issues, philosophy and reincarnation and... so much more as this story unfolds. It is about the fragility of the bonds that hold us together, and a son's harrowing realization of that fragility.

The characters are flawed only in the ways that real people are. The narrative is flawed only in the way it would be if actually told by a coming-of-age son. The family is flawed only in the ways real families are.

Hamilton's writing is flawless.

Some have commented that the son's narrative is confusing - sometimes adult and sometimes child-like. I'd argue that this is how any one of us would describe something difficult from our past: Sometimes with the wisened perspective adulthood gives us, and sometimes reverting to the voice of that scared child of the past, still struggling to make sense of something not totally within our then-limited childhood comprehension.

For the record, I've read "The Book of Ruth", "A Map of the World", "Short History of a Prince", and this, Hamilton's latest work. This is by far my favorite. It's not as intense as "Book of Ruth", and not as depressing as "A Map of the World". While I was a bit disappointed by "Short History of a Prince" for multiple reasons, I was delighted with "Disobedience". I'd highly recommend it.

Family dynamics and coming of age angst prevail in Disobedience, a stunning fourth novel from the gifted Jane Hamilton. With empathy and affection she enters her characters' lives to skillfully explore the ambiguous landscapes of human mind and heart.

Disobedience assumes varying forms and guises in this chronicle of one year in the life of the Shaw family, beginning with 17-year-old Henry who inadvertently opens his mother's email to discover that she is having an impassioned affair with Richard Polloco, a Ukrainian violin maker.

With his painful past of family terror during the Bolshevik Revolution, Polloco becomes to Beth Shaw "...a person with something real that had happened to him, that had wounded him. He was a person she might be able to comfort, a man she could lead out of the dark past, going from light to light to light."

Online in her loving communiques to Polloco, pianist and solid mother Beth has become Liza38, an i.d. bestowed upon her by Henry when he introduced her to the mysteries of computer operation. He wanted her to have a name with some gusto and this "sounded like the code name of a blond spy with a sizable bust" rather than a "flat, no crackle name, Beth."

The family is rounded out by father, Kevin, and thirteen-tear-old Elvira, a devoted, sometimes obsessive Civil War re-enactor who disguises herself as drummer boy Elviron to participate. She persists in always dressing in handmade Union uniforms, even to adding a clanking sword as she attends a family wedding. Elvira is encouraged in this pursuit by Kevin and worried over by Beth.

When Kevin, a liberal leaning high school history teacher, is ousted from his job in Vermont, a place Henry views as his "deepest sense of home," the Shaws move to an upscale suburb in Chicago.

Self described as "the heavyweight champion of depressed teenagehood," Henry wears long hair and wire rimmed specs. He is somewhat of a loner at his exclusive new school, and further alienated by the knowledge of Beth's unfaithfulness. Alternately fascinated and repelled, he knows he should not continue his "electronic eavesdropping," but he does. To him, her defection marks a loss of the childhood security that he once felt within his family circle. His response is further complicated by the fact that he has just experienced his first sexual encounter.

Beth's confessions of guilt to an online friend do little to win Henry's understanding or forgiveness. There are times when he is nominally courteous to her at best, entering into dinner table conversations only to taunt or disparage Elvira.

Some solace is found for Henry in his friendship with Karen, a schoolmate, who with her dyed black hair and bizarre clothing "looked as if she were a fifty-year-old masquerading as a teenager."

Were he to confide his mother's infidelity to Karen, he imagines she might attribute it to a menopausal thing, saying, "Think of the last egg hobbling down the fallopian tube, shrieking for one last sperm."

Ms. Hamilton has created an endearing figure in Henry, one who narrates his story with the insightfulness and bravado of an intelligent teenager. He is an embodiment of the difficulties encountered in growing up.

Reluctantly he accompanies Kevin, Beth and Elvira to a reenactment of the Battle of Shiloh. It is here that unforeseen events alter the family's course forever.

Deftly assured and almost preternaturally attuned to the feelings of a 17-year-old boy, Ms. Hamilton has again penned a story laced with humor, deep rooted love, and compassion. One could not find an abler guide to chart safe passage through the shoals of family life.

Jane Hamilton has perfect pitch! Each word, each sentence, each character is in perfect harmony. The Shaw family of four is disobedient in terms of middle-class, upper-midwest morals. Elvira, the 13-year-old sister and most colorful character in the book, a cross-dressing civil war living historian, seeks every possible opportunity to get it wrong. The father, an amateur historian and professional teacher, lacks passion and presence. Elizabeth, the mother, recreates period music on the piano, has an affair with a violinist, and arranges trysts for Henry, her 17-year-old son. Henry reads his mother's e-mail. Sometimes, even great signers choose odd operas and inappropriate roles. Ms. Hamilton's choice of a seventeen-year-old male for her first person voice was odd. Certain scenes were nearly perfect. Most seemed much more like the son's voice as imagined by the mother. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina works. Hamilton as Henry doesn't. If you're looking for a book about a seventeen-year-old boy becoming a man, don't look here. If you're looking for some of the best writing in America, buy this book. Jane Hamilton is among the best writers in the country.

Jane Hamilton came to Eau Claire, Wi in November promoting this book. After hearing her read the first chapter, I knew Disobedience had to be my selection for our January book club. Upon reading everyone else's reviews, I feel the major point of the book has been missed. The central theme is "deceptions". The deceipt of each character is woven into the fabric of the story: Beth Shaw's affair, Elvira Shaw's cross dressing, and Henry Shaw's spying on his mother through reading her email. One begins to wonder what Mr. Shaw's deception is......I feel that Jane Hamilton has surpassed herself with this novel. Each chapter slowly unveils the untruths of her character's lives. And of course we get only a one sided picture of each family member as seen through Henry's eyes. I can only wonder how fascinating this book would be if each character had a chapter and retold the story. We are given a glimpse of this in the Chapter on Shiloh. Henry relates the "outing" of Elvirnon in quite a different manner than his friend Karen does. I have read each of Ms. Hamilton's books and this one by far is my favorite. I love the construction of her sentences, and how she is able to convey so much meaning with so few words. I am definitely recommending this book to all of my friends, and anticipate our book club's get together.

Has Jane Hamilton missed the mark with "Disobedience"? This seems the debate raging, at quick glance, with fellow Amazon reviewers. Having read all of Hamilton's previous works, initially my concern was that she had. This is more a continuation of the reflective feel of "A Short History of a Prince" and less of the more plot-driven "The Book of Ruth" and "A Map of the World." This is where perhaps the "boring" criticism comes from, as Henry is hopelessly obsessed with his mother Beth's affair with a fellow musician. As with "Prince," Hamilton tells the story with a male narrator. Whether Henry comes out sounding more like a middle-aged woman than a young man is certainly debatable, but with Hamilton's writing skill I found it hard to complain.

Overall, "Disobedience" is a rich and thought-provoking work. First, there is the title. The easy leap to make is that the title refers to Beth's extramarital affair. But each character, in their own way, is "disobedient." Despite his mother's transgression, Henry's invasion of her e-mails would certainly not meet the "honor thy mother and father" criteria. Likewise, the sub-plot of Henry's sister's (Elvira) obsession with Civil War re-enactment only sets the stage for the many internal wars going on in the novel: a "typical" American family struggling to stay together, the battle of the sexes, and Henry's own struggle in becoming an adult. Certainly enough fodder for a book club, which Hamilton nicely skewers even after her own post-Oprah successes.

While Hamilton appears to be losing some of her rabid fan-base with her last two novels, in my humble opinion, "Disobedience" is only further evidence that Hamilton has only continued to make her mark as one of the top contemporary American authors.

The book opens with the narrator accidentally opening his mother's email account and discovering that she has just begun having an affair. And so the stage is set for a story about what happens in a family when one person has a secret and another person not only knows the secret but knows all the details of how the affair progresses (because he continues to read all the back and forth, almost daily, emails between his mother and her lover, plus the mother's emails confiding to her best friend). This story, for all its potential, is uninteresting and at times even dreary reading.

The book is written in the first person, narrated by the son Henry who at the time was 17. From the start I felt that the voice didn't sound quite right. A few pages into the book the reader learns that the story is being told "less than a decade later", which would make Henry in his mid-twenties. This made the voice a little more believable, but I still had trouble with it, I had the constant nagging sense that his writing style and observations just did not ring true. Then I wondered if in the end there would be a reason for the story being told ten years later, would we learn how these events affected Henry as an adult, or would it turn out that his printing of the emails would trigger some event years later?

There is so much that could have happened in this book, so much that I kept expecting to happen, but there just isn't enough here in the way of plot, and very little dialogue. Yes, there is some dialogue, but more often conversations are described. Much in the book is described, observed, thought about. It has a slow pace. In spite of all this, I started out enjoying this book and for the first 100 pages or so I had a hard time putting it down. The writing is beautifully crafted without getting bogged down and I liked the way the narrator saw the family's life, even though I never bought the idea that the narrator was a 17 year old boy or even a 27 year old man. When talking about the family moving from rural Vermont to Chicago he says "Outside we would be in danger from both the careless ways of the rich and the careless ways of the poor." And "I was taken from Vermont before I could think to want to leave it myself, and so for me Wellington is the ideal, my old backyard there my deepest sense of home."

It's lines like these that kept me turning the pages, up to a point. But then I got tired of not knowing who these people were. The father is a cheerful near-saint and not much more complex than that. The sister is passionate about Civil War reenactment. A good part of the book deals with that, but her character is not developed beyond that one aspect. And not enough happens in this book, although I kept thinking something would happen soon. Henry considers deleting some of the emails from his mother's lover before she can read them, or better yet, replying to the emails himself, posing as his mother. Will he do that? Will that lead to something else happening? His mother talks openly to the family about her lover, a fellow musician she has just met. She wants everyone to think this is just another friend, she wants to not appear secretive, but talking about him is risky. Will this lead to something? The mother goes to a psychic for some relief from her inner conflict and the son reads about it in an email and visits the same psychic. Will this lead to something?

Curiosity and good writing kept me reading the book but in the end I was disappointed. There were so many possiblities in this story, but none of them, for me, was realized. There was a weekend when Henry was distracted and unable to concentrate. He was reading a novel by a contemporary author whose name he has now forgotten. He says "A book I read from beginning to end that weekend without registering much action or dialogue." Maybe that line has to do with his lack of concentration. Or maybe it has to do with the book itself. That pretty much sums up my feelings towards this book. I read it, but I didn't register much action or dialogue.

"Disobedience", Jane Hamilton's searing new novel, has more than a passing resemblence to "Oedipus Rex". Henry Shaw, 17 going on 45, discovers his mother's email love affair with a man other than his father and seeks to observe and deconstruct the affair. His analysis of his mother's public and private behavior makes up much of this absorbing novel, but because this is the author of "Map of the World" you can be sure there will be more than a few other developments before the complex and heartbreaking book comes to a close.

Only an accomplished writer can pull off a narrative like this one: we come to know Beth Shaw, Henry's mother, only through her son's eyes and the content of her email. Can we trust either of these sources to complete a full portrait of this woman? I think not, and yet Beth's ambiguity is one of the novel's main accomplishments. She is portrayed as both a fierce and uninvolved parent, a loving and deceptive wife and a complex and incomplete woman. We are as intrigued and confused as her son.

"Disobedience" is one of the best books I have read this year. Anyone who loved "Map of the World" will love this one too.

A rite of passage story about Henry, who at 17 has discovered his mother's infidelity by reading her email messages, Disobedience explores complex family and gender themes. Marital strife, the disillusionment of a young man with his mother, a pubescent girl's rejection of her female self, and the desire of all members of the family to live in some form of fantasy rather than reality form the spine of this story.

Jane Hamilton has made some bold decisions as an author in the writing of Disobedience. Henry's imagination about the affair is the primary source of information about his mother's feelings. Hamilton loops back and forth through time as she follows Henry's description of the events of his senior year from his vantage point as an adult almost ten years later. Hamilton has written a novel about infidelity in which the wife, the husband and the lover are all still likable, wherein no one person is painted with a black and white brush. The Shaw family that Henry observes is both distanced by time and brought forward by passion in such a way that the reader is never at rest, never lulled into an easy acceptance of the narrative line.

I highly recommend Disobedience for a thought or discussion-provoking read. Just don't expect it to be unchallenging.

Henry Shaw is seventeen and a high school senior. Even though he has had a rather unusual and carefree childhood in rural Vermont, he considers himself part of an ordinary and happy family. It is only after he moves with his family to Chicago that he discovers, through inadvertently accessing his mother's email, that she is in love with a man other than his father. Should Henry confront her or must he suffer silently? His new knowledge of his mother's behavior is a burden for Henry. While he agonizes over this, his parents seem to be quietly waging their own war over Elvira, Henry's younger sister, who is slowly become a living re-enactment of a Civil War soldier.

DISOBEDIENCE is a novel of modern times and yet of an old problem. It focuses on a high-tech way of not only conducting, but also monitoring, a less than desirable relationship. The characters are so authentic that at least one of them is sure be reminiscent of a real life person! Hamilton does the voice of Henry so well that it's hard to realize that he is a fictional character and not a real young man struggling with a terrible family problem. All of the characters are graced with passion and humor which shine through the pages.

Hamilton highlights the way in which one particular family scapeges a particularly vulnerable family member. Often this happens in real life--the act of scapegoating--even though family problems are often system problems, those having to do with relationships between family members. Although some readers may view Elvira's antics as humorous, they are quite the opposite. In this story, Elvira suffers a great deal of torment from her mother and brother for an interest in which she has a great passion. Hamilton brings great insight into family relationships and into a teenager's way of thinking. Teens often think have things figured out, but they don't have enough life experience to truly understand complex situations. Some readers may be put off by the slow-moving the plot, but the pyschological action never lets up until the the last page is read.

I confess I haven't read any of Jane Hamilton's other books, but DISODEDIENCE has convinced me that I must. When I first received this novel, I cracked it, more or less idly, to see how it began. Before I knew it, I had been reading for a full hour. Hamilton's voice and her wise, often funny sensibilities carry this book, which otherwise could have been a trite piece of pop culture. Henry Shaw discovers through reading his mother's email account that she has a lover, and his view of the world shifts to accomodate his mother's private life. Although his reaction to the discovery is less than realistic (he takes it too quickly in stride), Henry's insights about love and family provide the layers that make this novel so remarkable. I agree with the editorial reviews that Henry as narrator slightly mars this otherwise seamless tale; he doesn't seem to be in touch with many teenage emotions, he doesn't provide a solid life context for his adult voice, and sometimes he doesn't even seem male. However, this flaw is, in my mind, inconsequential.

The best character by far is Henry's younger sister Elvira, an obsessed, gender-confused Civil War reenactor who upstages every other character. Simply put, her creation is brilliant. Henry's mother, Beth, is more ephemeral, as she should be, because she occupies the unique place in Henry's mind as mother first, then woman, a duality he must reconcile. Henry's father Kevin is Elvira's companion and co-conspirator, who loves his daughter's odd fascination with history. The dynamics among these family members form the heart of the story: who they are, who they aren't, and what they do or don't understand about each other. Henry's discovery of his mother's secret life is only a catalyst. The real story is the Shaws and their anachronistic, off-beat, and rebellious approach to life.

Read this book. I can't say how this compares to other Hamilton works, but I adored it.