Customer Reviews

The Sorrows of an American: A Novel

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I had never heard of this author until I heard her speak at the Key West Literary Seminar last then. Since then I have bought and read all of her books.


How can she do what she does on a page? How does she make the pages fall away and take me into a world that I never forget? I don't know the answer, but I do know as soon as I saw she had a new book out, The Sorrows Of An American I rushed right out to buy it -- and in the last two days have been transported, once again by a world I did not know I was missing.

Like her previous books, the characters (Erick, Miranda, Eggy, and Inga, and Max) in Sorrows of an American are now a part of my life. I shut the book last night and am still thinking of their world. Missing it, actually.

While following a mystery - edged with both agitated grief -- I learned about memory, light, darkness, and art.

No question about it -- this book will not disappoint you: the kind of reading experience that makes you re-remember the power that can be found in bound pages when created by a true artist. Plus, the story here is simply - INTERESTING.

In a day when smart, thoughtful fiction seems few and far between, I have been impressed with the thoughtful work of Siri Hustvedt. However, her latest book, 'The Sorrows of an American' was a bit too labyrinthian for me. While still finding much to like about the book, I was too often trying to place who was who, what was reality and what was a dream, etc. and it all interrupted the fluidity of the novel, for me at least. While usually enjoying free-flowing novels of uncertain trajectory (I'm a fan of her husband's work), I felt frustrated with 'Sorrows of an American.' Maybe it was my own mind, in a state of being pulled in one direction and then another due to some complexities in my own personal life that didn't allow me to appreciate this as much as her last work, 'What I Loved.' I will definitely revisit this book when my own mind is cleared of cobwebs and give it another try. Too many good reviews from critics I respect that fly in the face of my initial thoughts as I worked my way through this book. At any rate, with Auster and Hustvedt writing under the same roof, there's some seriously strong work being turned out that deserves much praise at a time when there's such a dearth of intelligent fiction.

Disappointing. I kept thinking to myself, How does a book like this even get published? I am an avid reader, and am not accustomed to disliking a book as much as I disliked this book.

First, Hustvedt fails to draw a believable male protagonist. The dialogue is also unbelievable, as it is convoluted and awkward. The characters in this book do not speak as real people do. Also, the plot is shaky-to-nonexistent. Most of the characters aren't particularly likable; they are over-privileged, self-involved, and depressing. I couldn't wait for this book to be over with. It was slow going without reward.

I wonder if the author writes essays. Her writing style seems better suited to that medium.

Based on other reviews here, it seems you either love this book, or hate it. If you have any doubts, think twice. You may just hate it.

This is a complex novel that reads like a literary mystery and at other times like a psychological drama. Everyone in the book hovers at the edge of the abyss. Even the mild-mannered, kind psychoanalyst, Erik Davidsen, who narrates the story which takes place in the year following the death of his father, Lars. Excerpts from Lars memoir appear occasionally: descriptions of his service in World War II or at his Norwegian family's farm. Interestingly, Siri Hustvedt states in her acknowledgments that they are nearly verbatim quotes from a journal by her own father, who died in February, 2003.

There is an engaging plot and suspense, but what makes this novel stand out is its intellectual clarity and prowess. I find the word "American" in the title ironic as I felt throughout my reading that the book was written by a European and I kept picturing London instead of New York, where it is set. This was because the book totally lacks a certain cultural element that is typical of American fiction: a kind of sentiment, or faith or anti-intellectualism. This novel is very interior, clinical and mentally disciplined. At times it read like a Bergman film, full of secrets and repressed emotion, characters haunted by past experience, yet never sentimental or romantic. The book's European intellectualism and lack of American surface-as-story romanticism is articulated by one of the characters, Inga, Erik's sister. She is describing a former actress who had an affair with her husband. Inga tells Erik that the actress had been an alcoholic but recovered by getting involved in New Age ideas. "She touts that half-baked, naïve, shiny American brand of mysticism, you know, Far East via California and Hallmark..." But what, I wondered, is both "half-baked" and "shiny"? The element mercury comes to mind and in fact is descriptive of American culture: amorphous, quicksilver fast, directionless. This quality is embodied in another character, a young hip New York artist, Jeff Lane, who documents everything with a high-speed digital camera, intruding everywhere, immortalizing the banal, he is a walking blog with spiky hair. But as he says of life, "The world is going virtual anyway."

As in every novel set in New York recently, there are frequent references to 9/11, but they are peripheral to this story which is primarily about the psychoanalytic approach to awareness. In fact, it could be an advertisement for psychoanalysis in that the brief case-histories narrated by Erik always show the analyst as deeply attuned and insightful, and the process of analysis as producing remarkable breakthroughs, lifting years of depression or allowing patients to experience a "reincarnation" in this life. If this novel veered into romanticism at any point it was its seeming faith in psychoanalysis.

There is much that is thought provoking and intriguing in The Sorrows of an American. It's a fascinating read.

"Dream economies are frugal. The smoking sky on September eleventh, the television images from Iraq, the bombs that burst on the beach where my father had dug himself a trench in February 1945 burned in unison on the familiar ground of rural Minnesota. Three detonations. Three men of three generations together in a house that was going to pieces, a house I had inherited, a house that shuddered and shook like my sobbing niece and my own besieged body, inner cataclysms I associated with two men who were no longer alive. My grandfather shouts in his sleep. My father shoves his fist through the ceiling. I quake."

Siri Hustvedt's The Sorrows of an American explores generations of memory overlapping in the present. At its simplest, the novel is about three watershed events burned into the memory of many American families: the Great Depression, World War II, and September 11th, 2001. But to say this is to over-simplify a rich book with incredibly present, whole characters, made real for the layers of memory wound within each of them.

One has the sense that Hustvedt's characters have always existed, that she did not create something new but captured all the lovely loneliness, all the complexity of baggage-heavy humanity. This sense of realism can be attributed to the backwards and forwards chronology of the text (a pre-existing history that informs the present), the exploration of dreams that make the "reality" of the text seem more real in contrast, and references to real events (September 11th, World War II) and fictional creations (poems, films) that impact the lives of the characters.

The novel opens in media res: the narrator's father is dead, and he has to wait until spring to bury his father on the farmstead of his youth. The first-person narrator is a psychoanalyst and a divorcee, a Brooklynite by way of rural Minnesota. We see the push and pull of his disturbed patients and his own changing moods as he goes over his dead father's memoirs and attempts to comfort his sister, Inga, an author mourning both her father and her legendary literary husband. Meanwhile, Inga is consumed with warding off threats to her husband's reputation while raising their world-sensitive daughter alone in the wake of September 11th (an event the girl witnessed from her window, and writes about obsessively in her poetry).

The conversations between brother and sister often return to the farm of their childhood, and some of Hustvedt's most beautiful passages are those memories told through the eyes of the young pair. Their memories, and those of the remaining members of their father's generation, are all they have to unravel a mysterious event mentioned in their father's papers.

The effect of this excess of memory--memories of his own life, and the written memories of his father--manifests itself in the narrator's loneliness. He continually finds himself saying, "I am so lonely" aloud in his empty apartment, most often after interactions with his alluring tenant, a brooding painter and loving single mother to an enchanting little girl named Eggy. The young girl takes a liking to the doctor upstairs, and her childish musings inspire dreams that mix the narrator's childhood with the daytime play of the girl downstairs, his own father and Eggy's mother, Miranda.

Dreams pervade the text; characters tell the stories of their dreams and memories and the narrator analyzes them until there is hardly a distinction between the two. The narrator dreams he is talking to his father on some nights, while on others he occupies the place of his father, "reliving" whole passages from his father's journal- his World War II experiences in particular. It is as if, in his dreams, he is living out his father's episodes of posttraumatic stress.

Miranda recounts violent dreams mixing Jamaican folklore she was told as a girl with the experience of childbirth, vivid dreams which she paints in her waking hours. Her canvases are full of snarling teeth, defecation, violence and altered bodies, bright colors and shrunken heads.

"There is no clear border between remembering and imagining," states the narrator. "When I listen to a patient, I am not reconstructing the `facts' of a case history but listening for patterns, strains of feeling, and associations that may move us out of painful repetitions and into an articulated understanding." The entire book is a search for understanding, a repetition of the actions of dead fathers and lovers articulated and turned over by those left behind.

The mourning wife obsessively watches images from her husband's film.

The narrator can't stop remembering his father's nocturnal strolls, and is driven to carry on the same behavior, as if the memories and urges of a dead man live on in his son.

The search for understanding-- both of the self and of the dead--is made difficult through the blurring of fiction and fact throughout the text. The narrator claims: "we make our narratives, and those created stories can't be separated from the culture in which we live." He continues, "There are times, however, when fantasy, delusion, or outright lies parade as autobiography."

One of the characters pursues a relationship with their own fictional creation; the dreams, paintings, and poems created by individuals in the book are each fragmented narratives created to make reality bearable. Yet all of the artistic output created and described in the book is, of course, the fictional creation of one author: Siri Hustvedt.

Except, of course, for the inclusion of a bit of pure reality: the journal entries of the narrator's deceased father are lifted word-for-word (with minimal edits) from the journal of Hustvedt's own father.

How's that for separating story and autobiography?

In a panel conversation at The Festival of French Writers, Hustvedt confessed: "writing fiction is like remembering what never happened." The memory of the whole people she created--some with cloth from her own life--is made real in the space of her text, lingering long after the last page is turned.

For more reviews on books with memory as a theme, please visit www.lanew-yorkaise.com

"I think we all have ghosts inside us, and it's better when they speak than when they don't." Such are the pseudo-profundities on offer here. Coupled with the pseudo-intensity of the characters' descriptions of their interior states ("I'm burning, Erik, I'm burning, and there's more, much more, and it's all very close to me" -- oh dear), they make for an extremely annoying book. Even the intellectual discussions are irritating, because they are finally not intelligent enough to justify their inclusion. This is a book that seems absolutely determined to impress the reader with the author's sensitivity and brilliance and sense of mystery, and that very determination is its undoing.

This really is an awful book. Characters that are unsympathetic, a plot that is far too self-conscious, and writing that borders on senseless do not make for good reading. Read some of Paul Auster's best books instead.

I had hopes for this book. It was a selection for the Picador Twitter book club. I had great luck with the previous selections but this one.... Topics and details are constantly introduced and you are sure they go somewhere but they never do. Characters without any purpose. One terrible moment after another is referenced but it is always in the past. We, the reader, must be watching the boring part of these peoples lives. Secrets are obvious and predictable. Sexuality is used to a creepy effect and isn't all that revealing in any of the characters. And the somber methodical pace that suggests a loneliness soon turns to a plodding depression. The book touts an "anticlimax" but truth is we don't care by the time we get there and nothing happens. The last section is a sloppy, stream-of-consciousness rehash of the last 300 pages. I just wanted to finish and leave. I don't quit books but I considered it more than once with this one.

There's true pleasure in watching an accomplished novelist skillfully create a multilayered story that combines complex and intensely interesting characters with an absorbing plot. In her latest novel, Siri Hustvedt has accomplished that task with sensitivity and quiet passion.

Following the death of their elderly father, Lars Davidsen, a history professor at a small Minnesota college, his children Erik, a New York psychotherapist, and Inga, a cultural critic, find themselves in the family home sifting through their father's papers. In the course of their search they encounter a letter dated June 27, 1937 that states: "Dear Lars, I know you will never ever say nothing about what happened. We swore it on the BIBLE. It can't matter now she's in heaven or to the ones here on earth. I believe in your promise. Lisa." That discovery launches the siblings on a quest to find the truth about the event that prompted the cryptic message. While their patient investigation eventually uncovers that truth, it's only one of several mysteries revealed in the course of this intricately plotted novel.

Woven through Erik's first person narrative are excerpts from a journal kept by Lars Davidsen that recount fragments of family history on a farm in Depression-era Minnesota and continues through Lars's service in the bloody battles of the South Pacific in World War II. Intriguingly, as Hustvedt reveals in her acknowledgements, the journal segments are drawn from a family memoir written by her father, who died in 2003. Through the journal, Erik gradually learns of the hardships that shaped his family and gains new insights into the mind of this decent if emotionally constricted man, groping for an understanding of the "earlier generations who occupy the mental terrain within us and the silences on that old ground, where shifting wraiths pass or speak in voices so low we can't hear what they are saying."

Alongside these family stories, events in Erik's life take a dark turn. Miranda Casaubon, a book designer and artist, and her precocious five-year-old daughter Eglantine rent an apartment on the ground floor of his Brooklyn house, and he is quickly, if disturbingly, drawn into the circle of their lives. He discovers photographs, some of them defaced, of the mother and daughter and learns they're being stalked by a performance artist named Jeffrey Lane, Miranda's former lover and Eglantine's father. Soon Lane adds photographs of Erik to his collection, and the tension between them builds to an inevitable confrontation.

Erik's character also is revealed through the counseling sessions he conducts with his patients, identified only as "Mr. T." or "Ms. W." In these often frustrating and sometimes painful encounters, Hustvedt exposes the benefits and limitations of psychoanalysis, using them to explore Erik's internal struggles --- his growing attraction to Miranda, his unease over Lane's bizarre activities and his desire to deepen his understanding of his father's life. As Erik's own psychotherapist reminds him, "We're fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy."

Erik's sister, Inga, wrestles with her own demons. Her husband, Max Blaustein, a prominent novelist and screenwriter, has been dead for several years, and now other writers, from an aggressive magazine reporter to Max's biographer, seek to penetrate the mysteries of his life. When Inga discovers that the star of one of Max's movies possesses some of his letters, she is forced to reassess her understanding of Max's life.

As much as it is a family chronicle, this novel is a story of memory, reminding us that "our memories are forever being altered by the present --- memory isn't stable, but mutable." It's a tale of secrets, exploring the lengths we will go to preserve them and the toll that effort exacts. And through Hustvedt's skillful portrayal of Erik's counseling sessions and the active dream lives of her characters, it's a vivid exposition of the power of dreams.

THE SORROWS OF AN AMERICAN is a pensive, subtle novel. Still, strong undercurrents of tension --- psychological, emotional and erotic --- surge through its pages. Siri Hustvedt demonstrates an acute and honest willingness to engage with powerful, sometimes disturbing emotions. It's that engagement that makes this book such an admirable work.

This is the first book that I have read by Hustvedt. I knew little about her or her work or her life, aside from her obvious connection to Paul Auster.

After I finished the book, I was left with mixed emotions. The book is an odd bundle of contradictions. There is a lot of plot to it-- mysterious memoirs, family secrets, stalkers, psychiatrists, bonds with the past and present of families. For all the plot, however, the moments are often so subtle they vanish like cobwebs. I was moved by the book when I was reading it, but found I had a very difficult time remembering any of the specifics when I sat down to write this review. I might have wished for some of this book to be more starkly drawn. Perhaps because there was so much, perhaps because Hustvedt so resolutely refuses grand moments, perhaps something to do with my limitations as a reader-- not sure, but it was a little too ephemeral for me.

Also, I really had trouble with Erik as a male character for the first quarter or so of the book. After I finished, I read several critics comments saying (based on apparent biographical knowledge) that Erik was "clearly" Hustvedt herself. I don't know about that, but I suppose it would explain the thing. What I do know is that I really had to get through the dissonance between how I read the character and his gender. I did, eventually. But it took me a while.

The writing itself is gorgeous. No doubt about that. I will certainly read something more by Siri Hustvedt. Recommendations as to what are gratefully accepted.