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"The only story I want to tell, the only one I seem to have in me, is this one. It is always about her." So ends DISOBEDIENCE, a far cry from Jane Hamilton's moving A MAP OF THE WORLD and the fun THE SHORT HISTORY OF A PRINCE. DISOBEDIENCE is a strange book, told from the perspective of a son who has a love for his mother that borders on strangling and a secret desire to bring her down at the same time. Henry revisits his past from the secure foundation of his future in order to relive the details of the summer that his family came apart and came back together, tethered with crazy glue, experience, and a little love.
The story is like a bad student film --- it goes on way too long and somewhere along that long ride it loses its narrative grip. The intensity and complexities of the situations that make her other books so unforgettable are missing here --- Hamilton took too little time working out the intricacies of this complicated tale. The idea of the past invading the present is a decent theme, what with Henry's remembrances, the mother-son theme, and the Civil War stuff that goes on and on. But we are uninvolved emotionally in the goings-on. Henry, for all his being "perfectly agreeable," is really a big whiner --- descriptions of fondling in the bushes at camp have greater virility than all his plodding concern for his mother's situation. His sister's brutal unveiling at a Shiloh reenactment has all the elements of an abusive beating, but the emotional register never hits the right level. Everything feels very halfhearted emotionally.
It's not often that a protagonist gets to unload all his anger and wonder about a parent's seemingly despicable behavior after the fact --- but that is exactly what keeps DISOBEDIENCE from being a really great read. Henry, the son, drones on and on for hundreds of pages about the minutiae of their lives --- Minty, the rich grandmother who gives them all her money and all her contempt; Elvirnon (or Elvira), the crazy sister who lives to reenact Civil War life, from head to toe, and who worries her mother with thoughts that she is becoming, of all things, a "bull-dyke" because of her interest in dressing like a soldier (clearly considered a lousy alternative to adulterous adulthood); a father of little or no authoritative consequence; Karen, the friendly intellectual who supports Henry's life of the mind; and Lily, the wistful girl from music camp for whom he lusts while trying to figure out why his mother's passion is tearing her away from their already dysfunctional family. There are no heroes here and no particular characters with whom you can immediately relate, thus keeping the reader somewhat distanced from the emotional core of the story. Henry's telling doesn't draw us in as it should.
If only the story were told from a more umbrella point of view perhaps DISOBEDIENCE would have been a much more compelling story altogether. As it is, it's a lesser effort from a usually first-rate novelist.
--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano
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