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George Hagen's debut novel, THE LAMENTS, begins in the mid-1950s with two babies switched at birth, thanks to an overzealous doctor and two mothers --- one overeager and one overpermissive. Julia Lament's son, a healthy and as-yet-unnamed baby, is given to a woman named Mary to nurse while Mary's son, born premature, lays in an incubator, untouchable and therefore unnursable. After developing a strong attachment to Julia's child, Mary decides to steal him, leaving Julia and her husband, Howard, with a son who is not their own, whom they name Will after his will to live.
It's a quirky beginning to a novel that only gets increasingly quirkier with every chapter. After leaving the hospital, the makeshift Lament family settles in South Rhodesia, but soon moves to Bahrain so Howard can follow his dreams of becoming an engineer and inventor. But Bahrain is too crowded and hot for him, so the family moves to the small town of Albo, North Rhodesia, where Julia has twins, Julius and Marcus. As political turmoil heats up locally, the Laments move again, just weeks before North Rhodesia becomes Zambia.
Leaving the relative prosperity they enjoyed in Africa, the Laments settle in a suburb of London, but soon enough, Howard's job hits a dead end. So the clan moves to New Jersey, where soon enough they move again. And yet again. Over nearly four hundred pages, this global picaresque is a bit repetitive and feels frenzied and forced. In an effort to keep the pace moving quickly, Hagen withdraws the Laments from these locales (the literary equivalent of an emergency airlift) just before anything dramatic happens, so their presence there feels transitory to the Laments as well as to the reader. For instance, when Howard and Julia return home with Will, there is very little blame or recrimination between them over their real son's fate and their new son's presence; in fact, there is very little emotion other than the restlessness that leads them to Bahrain.
There Julia enjoys the friendship of a brash American named Trixie Howitzer and endures the flirtations of a dashing Arab who recalls Clark Gable, but she and Howard flee for North Rhodesia before anything interesting can develop. There are a few intriguing episodes in Albo and England, but nothing substantial. Only in America do they stay long enough to generate much of a plot. The point is that these characters are a family without a country, "perpetual strangers" wherever they go. Unfortunately, Hagen's jumpy plotting forces the reader into a similarly unsettling and unsatisfying limbo.
As a result of this narrative transience, THE LAMENTS reads like a missed opportunity to capture a world in flux --- not just culturally and politically, but also personally for the Lament family. Hagen keeps his eye so closely attuned to the fast-paced and quirky plot that he fails to capture the world around his characters adequately or vividly. Only Bahrain is evoked in any specific detail; the events in North Rhodesia could have happened anywhere, and Hagen tries to pass off shorthand observations about England --- bad weather, worse plumbing --- as actual descriptions, such that England comes off not so much as a real place, but as a sitcom setting.
It's surprising, then, that THE LAMENTS is engaging at all, but Hagen has an undeniable facility with his characters, especially Julia and Will, who are by far the most compelling people in the novel. Both of them suffer severely from the family's nomadic tendencies: Julia feels particularly rootless with no job and no point to her days, and Will, in addition to suspecting his adoptive status, makes friends at school only to be uprooted before he can truly connect with anyone or see himself as others see him. Julia and Will Lament are believable and sympathetic enough to get a reader through this lengthy novel, but they cannot make it resound the way it should.
--- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner
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