Book Review: ‘Mothers and Sons,’ by Adam Haslett

Peter needs Ann. The question is how, despite their superficial similarity, this mother and son came to be parted, and why Ann has been unable to respond to Peter’s obvious angst. (Their experience is shadowed by other mother-son relationships, including, from outside the book, the lesbian mother and gay son in Alan Hollinghurst’s recent “Our Evenings.”)

Of course, it is the gradually uncovered story of what happened with Jared — especially on the night obliquely described at the beginning — that will provide the answer. Or many answers. Because the novel is really about the ways that our self-explanations — so often self-justifications — fail to encompass our lives. How misleading they can be, and confining. How they can distance and divide us, as much as provide common ground.

“It’s what I’ve spent my adult life doing,” Peter thinks. “Whittling stories down into patterns the law can see. … And yet in that shaping, what violence is done to the fullness of an actual life.”

“Mothers and Sons” is Haslett’s best novel. By limiting his area of inquiry, he achieves new levels of moral depth and narrative push. But he has not escaped old problems; in some ways he has entrenched them. The past remains an accurate predictor of future ills, leading characters to banal and often sentimental therapeutic realizations (stated, one feels, in Haslett’s voice rather than their own). In this book, we get “what a waste a closed heart is” and “how full of shame it is to be lonely,” among others.

Indeed the quantity of remembered events, all of them in the service of Haslett’s main themes, undermines his argument for our bursting multifariousness: everything fits, too neatly and tightly. And it means that we tend to be told about the lives and personalities of characters, rather than learning from their actions and speech. Constantly looking backward, we lose the pleasure, and the interest, of living with them in the moment.

MOTHERS AND SONS | By Adam Haslett | Little, Brown | 336 pp. | $29