Gotham Diary:
Chattering and Clattering
13 March 2014

Fay Weldon’s Kehua! is a smart and jolly book, and I enjoyed almost every page. Especially surprising was author’s ability to pause the fictional action for interruptions in her own voice, “I your Writer,” without damaging the integrity of her creation, which sprang to life every time she returned to it. Held up to the light just so, Kehua! is an object lesson in the psychology of reading novels, circa 2015 CE. Does it really make sense, anymore, to speak of “the willing suspension of disbelief”? In regular asides, Your Writer appraises her characters, frequently telling us that she only just now learned something about one of them, a detail that figured in the previous chapter. Is she indeed making things up as she goes along? It doesn’t matter, because when the characters resume their interactions with the world that she has created, they are as convincing as the subjects of nonfiction journalism, and we completely forget about having been taken backstage. We forget about the second set of characters in Kehua!, a party of ghosts, people who used to inhabit the house where Your Writer lives and works. It would be more reasonable to speak of involuntary amnesia.

Some readers will object to the Writer’s intrusions, preferring to get on with the story of the McLean women. There is Beverley, a septuagenarian, born in New Zealand but long resident in London; her daughter, Alice; Alice’s daughters, Mary and Joan, who have rechristened themselves Cynara and Scarlet, and Cynara’s daughter, teenaged Lola. The action begins with Scarlet’s decision to leave her partner, Louis — they have never actually married — for her lover, Jackson, an ageing movie heartthrob; and for a long time Louis and Jackson are the only men in the story. We are told that Beverley has been widowed three times, and that she had a son, now in Hollywood, but Weldon’s storytelling is so convivially generous that we never miss the unmentioned fathers. When Weldon takes to identifying them, later in the book, a rather gothic pattern emerges, but quite without gothic horror.

Horror has been disarmed from the start, with the introduction of figures from Maori mythology. The tone is set by the kehua of the title. In the glossary at the back, kehua are described as “the wandering spirits of the homeless dead, whose task is to shepherd the living and the dead of the [clan] toward the [soul of the extended family].” But Weldon has a lot of other things to say about kehua. If you squint, you can see them: they look like fruit bats. They “chatter and clatter” whenever they’re aroused, and they’re always aroused by excitement. They give advice, but the advice is often bad advice, because kehua are not very bright. Kehua are, in short, rather clownish — a nuisance, perhaps, but not a dangerous nuisance, unless you heed their warnings to run, run, run. Kehua have followed Beverley to England, an unwonted voyage that gives rise to many droll remarks but that results, not surprisingly, in the kehua going native in Highgate. (English trees are easier to hang from.) Why have they followed her? Because the proper rites and rituals were not observed when her parents met their untimely, gory fates. The gruesome murder-suicide in Beverley’s past is just that: in the past. Once it is disclosed in the present, the kehua will quiet down.

Why not? Why not introduce a troupe of exotic supernaturals from a relatively unknown culture? Our myths could use a bit of competition. (The only vampire in this novel is a movie role, played to death by Jackson.) Forget everything you know about women and witches and occidental afterlives. Let’s go Lévi-Strauss instead. The overt “anthropological” note harmonizes so beautifully with the metafictional incursions and the constant deconstructions of romance.

Will Scarlet actually leave Louis? Weldon makes a joke out of prolonging the uncertainty, all the while piling up the flaky reasons for and against. More than half of the novel “takes place” on a single morning, and when the first part comes to an end (to make way for the story of Beverley’s quietly lurid childhood in New Zealand), Scarlet is merely on her way to the assignation. Fifty pages earlier, Weldon assures us that kehua will follow Beverley and her clan wherever they go, even to Jackson’s “shagpiled” apartment in Soho: “should Scarlet ever get there, and I am beginning to think she will.” [Emphasis supplied.] Weldon is a past-master at keeping us thoroughly entertained even while “nothing happens.”

I do ask myself, however, if I’ll ever reread Kehua! I know that it won’t be entirely up to me. Something will have to trigger the itch — wouldn’t “itch the trigger” make more sense? — to have another look at it. For the moment, I’m amply entertained: I’ve been to a marvelous party. But there’s no hangover. I’ve not been haunted by memorable characters like Kate Nolan (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) or Kate Croy (The Wings of the Dove). But the demand for soulfulness might be wrong-headed. Alison Lurie winds up the review that got me to read Kehua! thus:

Kehua! is not only a good story and a lot of fun to read, it is a remarkable account of what it’s like to write a novel by someone who’s been doing this for over fifty years. Of course, Your Writer is not really Fay Weldon, but another metafictional invention, whose house and husband have different names from those of the author. Still, what she says about the process of writing a novel seems authentic, and matches experiences that Your Reviewer, who is perhaps not really Alison Lurie, has had.

***

After lunch, I read Andrew Solomon’s New Yorker piece about meeting and talking with Peter Lanza, father of the Sandy Hook shooter. The killings at the elementary school are mentioned, of course, but only in passing: Solomon’s focus is the mounting difficulty of Adam Lanza’s brief life — and the corresponding difficulty of living with him. After his parents separated, in 2001, Adam, aged nine, was asked by a psychiatrist how he felt about it. He is said to have answered that “his parents were as irritating to each other as they were to him.”

Assuming Solomon’s story to be comprehensive — assuming that he hasn’t left out some chunk of detail that would lead to a different conclusion — it stands as a demonstration of the ludicrous extent to which today’s Americans are abandoned to their own autonomy. From the moment that then-thirteen year-old Adam refused to accept the diagnosis of Asperger’s, his family had a problem that it could not be expected to handle on its own. We have largely dismantled the institutional resources that used to provide some help, to families if not to patients; they were usually invasive and often inhumane.

(Having been happiest, as a teenager, at boarding school, however, I am seriously open to the idea of institutionalizing all adolescents.)

It is heartbreaking to consider the task that Nancy Lanza — shot by her son four times before he headed to the school — believed that she could perform. Living alone with Adam, she gradually closed ranks around him, saying nothing about his difficulties to her friends and barring Peter from visits, thus denying the boy’s father a chance to form first-hand impressions. Nancy worried that Adam would withdraw completely into himself, but it never occurred to her that this withdrawal might occur in a convulsive form, ending with violent termination. Perhaps a less interested observer might have insisted that the firearms be removed from the house, but we’ll never know that; all we do know is that there was nothing to protect Nancy from herself.

All parenting involves choosing between the day (why have another argument at dinner?) and the years (the child must learn to eat vegetables). Nancy’s error seems to have been that she always focussed on the day, in a ceaseless quest to keep peace in the home she shared with the hypersensitive, controlling, increasingly hostile stranger who was her son. She thought that she could keep the years at bay by making each day as good as possible, but her willingness to indulge his isolation may well have exacerbated the problems it was intended to ameliorate.

By this time, Adam had been seen by enough doctors and therapists to wear a halo of red flags. Routine reviews ought to have been mandated, including placing Adam under observation at regular intervals. It seems the merest common sense to suggest that living alone together in a relatively secluded suburban house cannot have been healthy for either mother or son, especially when the boy refused to go out. Adam’s Internet activity ought to have been monitored, and teased into real-world encounters. Why are bright but asocial young men thrown back on themselves, when it seems obvious that they could be harnessed by research and military institutions?

Why are we satisfied with a culture that delights in lending a helping hand to those already marked for success, while dismissing everyone else as a loser? What are we afraid of?

Not Adam Lanza, it seems.