FictionReviewA boy takes up ballet in 1960s South Dakota, in this bruising novel about siblings, self-destruction and survivor guilt
The family is a complex collective: no matter how far from it we roam, or how radically we transform ourselves, we can’t cut loose from our origins. We are who we are partly because of how we were raised, and who we were raised with. Often, within families, there is a parent or brother or sister around whom all the other members of the family cannot but shape themselves. In Paula Saunders’s debut novel, a tale of a family in crisis against the unlikely backdrop of ballet studios in 1960s South Dakota, this role is played by Leon, half of the brother-sister duo at its heart.
The patriarch is Al, a cattle dealer, who much prefers his daughter Rene to his son Leon. Rene is driven, sharp, self-sufficient. Leon is the opposite, at least as a child: patient, pliable, stammering. Their mother Eve, a homemaker and seamstress who eventually opens a small ballet studio of her own, dotes on Leon. When she signs him up for tap dancing lessons, we know it is not going to end well.
Not surprisingly, Al hates that his son is dancing – and his disgust grows when Leon switches to ballet. Rene takes up ballet too, and both children discover themselves in dance, but this is cattle country, hardscrabble and haunted by violence. (At the local Native American museum, alongside the beaded moccasins and leather loincloths, there are “old black-and-white photos of Indians frozen in pools of their own blood”.) It’s not a world that, 60 years ago, could easily accommodate a boy in tights: the teachers and kids start calling Leon “homo”, “freak”, “queer”. Things unravel quickly: by the age of 15, he’s in deep trouble. Rene, meanwhile, is thriving, if at the expense of friendships. She does nothing halfheartedly – whether heading the cheerleading squad or briefly joining the evangelicals – and her “will to excel” arouses the envy and hatred of her classmates.
One of the questions this novel poses is how to live with the knowledge that you have failed to save a sibling from the world’s evils or from self-destruction. In a moment of survivor guilt, Rene muses: “She must have done the same to Leon as she’d done to her classmates … eclipsed and overstepped him without even bothering to look. But the world wasn’t tender-hearted or willing to hit the dirt, as her older brother had been.”
Most of the novel is set during Rene and Leon’s childhood, and Saunders, who is married to novelist and short story writer George Saunders, is strong on the shifting sands of family life: the loyalties and betrayals, how anger and love get all mixed up, the way absent fathers can enjoy an undeserved affection. After Al violently beats his son, then takes to the road, Saunders writes: “Al was around only as a kind of gift, showing up now and again just as Rene was beginning to wonder if she’d ever see him again, and it was Eve she hated for Leon’s beating.”
The family is an ever-evolving organism, and this one is no different. Resentments burn themselves out, new avenues for understanding open up, usually when it’s too late. As the novel progresses, we get glimpses of the future – snapshots of time Saunders drops in that leapfrog years and land us in the distant aftermath of all that originary mess and heartache. I am sorry she doesn’t delve more deeply into Rene and Leon’s adult lives, for when she does there is a power and poignancy that is sometimes lacking in the childhood narrative.
Novelists often balk at being asked to explain to what extent a novel corresponds to their real lives. In a letter accompanying the book’s publicity material, Saunders has provided a sort of artist’s statement addressing that question: her father was a cattle trader, she and her brother were serious students of ballet in South Dakota, her brother’s life went off the rails. She hopes that, by excavating the love that coexisted alongside the hurt in her family, the novel might “benefit the hearts” of those who read it.
Such a declaration raises the question of whether novels – and readers – are best served when a novelist’s aim is to “illuminate a path” by which we might take a fresh look at their “most difficult experiences”. We tend to think of that as the job of another kind of book. While novels can certainly open eyes and change lives, the self-help impulse may be a problematic starting point.
Whatever a writer has in mind while writing, a novel sinks or swims according to its merits. There were stories in The Distance Home that I wanted more of, and others I wanted less of, and I sometimes wished the book had been written as a memoir. Freed of the burden of plotting, the sheer, raw power of this family’s story – so unusual in its context and emblematic in its agonies – might have been plumbed to its depths. The moments when that was achieved made me yearn for more.
Molly McCloskey’s When Light Is Like Water is out in paperback (Penguin). The Distance Home is published by Picador (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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