The Sorrows of an American Read online

  Siri Hustvedt is the author of three previous novels, What I Loved, The Blindfold, and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, as well as two collections of essays, A Plea for Eros and Mysteries of the Rectangle. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Paul Auster.

  Also by Siri Hustvedt

  NOVELS

  What I Loved

  The Blindfold

  The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

  NONFICTION

  Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting

  A Plea for Eros

  POETRY

  Reading to You

  Additional Praise for

  The Sorrows of an American

  “The narrative is breathtakingly clear, heartfelt, and involving. Hustvedt has written a novel of quiet strength.”

  —Library Journal

  “A cunningly disguised epic . . . Hustvedt’s gifted storytelling crams five generations into a compact, elegant story. . . . [She] deftly weaves the lot into fictional silk that shimmers with emotional contrast and intellectual honesty. . . . Hustvedt’s artistry is that she sails off into an emotional legacy and seduces us into sharing the journey with her.”

  —The Sydney Morning Herald

  “Filled with marvelous, eccentric characters who have intimations of impending disaster, [Hustvedt’s novels] unfold from their strange cocoons to reveal surprisingly ordinary folk. . . . Her prose is a joy to read.”

  —The Australian

  “Siri Hustvedt is a modern master. Her works belong among the most exciting and insightful contemporary novelists. . . . The Sorrows of an American is the kind of book that spoils you for other novels.”

  —The Age

  “[An] elegant meditation on familial grief, memory, and imagination. . . . The problem with trauma and grief is that it’s inexpressible—it is ‘outside story,’ as Erik says, it is ‘what we refuse to make part of our story.’ But solace can be found in the attempt at articulation.”

  —Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

  “Hustvedt has a keen eye for visual detail and a sure handle on narrative structure. Her well-crafted prose and impeccably paced story pull the reader along as her characters uncover the secrets of the dead and probe their own subconscious desires.”

  —The Village Voice

  “The Sorrows of an American is a pensive, subtle novel. Still, strong undercurrents of tension—psychological, emotional, and erotic—surge through its pages. Siri Hustvedt demonstrates an acute and honest willingness to engage with powerful, sometimes disturbing emotions. It’s that engagement that makes this book such an admirable work.”

  —Bookreporter.com

  “Poignant . . . the meditative tone of the book is poetry at its best. . . . Its cadence is often in sharp contrast to bustling New York City and its inhabitants. But it is in describing Erik’s pastoral Minnesota hometown that Hustvedt, a native Minnesotan, is at her best. . . . At its heart, The Sorrows of an American explores loneliness and untold stories. It asks the question, ‘How do we make amends with our memories?’ ”

  —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “A lovely and gentle exploration of family life by a great writer . . . Hustvedt’s elegant style classifies her as a great storyteller.”

  —The Sunday Telegraph (UK)

  “Satisfying and emotionally rich . . . Ms. Hustvedt’s cerebral characters are tenderly drawn, wise, and realistic. With a sure hand, she communicates both the intellectual dynamism of New York—where ‘talk is a form of play’—and the blank endlessness of the Minnesota landscape. The result is a beautifully sincere examination of the grim traps of overactive minds.”

  —The Economist

  “Hustvedt continues, with grace and aplomb, her exploration of family connectedness, loss, grief, and art.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Hustvedt writes spectacular sentences that embody the American experience in brilliantly specific physical imagery.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “This novel is easily described as wonderful, although, like a lot of great novels . . . you have to read it to believe it. The Sorrows of an American does have a lot of plot, but that is not the main attraction: its beauty lies in the ability of the narrator to reveal the frailties of the human mind. . . . Her skill lies in convincing the reader that we have seen right inside someone’s soul.”

  —The Observer (London)

  “[The Sorrows of an American] brims with luminous, unknowable characters . . . a book about memory and loss, about how we reconstruct our pasts through our families and how we continue to rewrite them for our present selves. It’s also about the gap between what we think we know about someone close to us, and how much more there is that we can never know.”

  —Scotland on Sunday

  “A mystery story that develops into a subtle and complex novel . . . Hustvedt switches gracefully between her characters, involving them in each other’s webs of grief and secrecy, confession and anger, lust and need. She weaves together family saga, comedy of manners, and gothic horror. . . . With great skill, she shows inner and outer worlds colliding with and penetrating one another.”

  —The Sunday Times (UK)

  “A profound analysis of how loss and the fear of living are the roots of Erik’s depression. What begins as a baffling puzzle ends on a movingly optimistic note. . . . Warmly recommended.”

  —Daily Mail (UK)

  “A masterful semi-self-portrait, by turns abstract and realistic, intimate and alienating, effulgent and bleak, concise and blurry, straightforward and elusive—but the author couldn’t have it any other way.”

  —The Times (UK)

  “An intriguing novel of suspense, beautifully combined with a melancholic treatise on memories and loss.”

  —Psychologies (UK)

  “For all its cerebral riches, this novel is composed with superb artistry. Hustvedt handles the numerous interlocking narratives with immense skill. From the rural farm during the Depression to urban New York, every life is revealed with precision and love. . . . It is proof of Hustvedt’s talents that the terrors of this novel feel real.”

  —Literary Review (UK)

  “A kaleidoscope of intellectual and emotional ideas, dancing with philosophical speculation, neuroscience, and an ongoing enquiry into the relationship between the self and creativity. Rather than drift into abstraction, these ideas are pinned to characters who are intriguingly flawed and damaged, and who, in trying to confront that damage, throw some light on the mystery of what makes us who we are.”

  —Metro (UK)

  THE SORROWS

  OF AN AMERICAN

  SIRI HUSTVEDT

  A Novel

  Picador

  A FRANCES COADY BOOK

  Henry Holt and Company

  NEW YORK

  THE SORROWS OF AN AMERICAN. Copyright © 2008 by Siri Hustvedt. All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Picador,

  175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.picadorusa.com

  Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Henry Holt and Company

  under license from Pan Books Limited.

  For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, please contact Picador.

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Designed by Victoria Hartman

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hustvedt, Siri.

  The sorrows of an American / Siri Hustvedt.—1st Picador ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-312-42820-4

  ISBN-10: 0-312-42820-0

  1. Fathers—Death—Psychological aspects—Fiction. 2. Brothers and s
isters—Fiction.

  3. Family secrets—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.U813S67 2009

  813'.54—dc22

  2008047343

  First published in the United States by Henry Holt and Company

  First Picador Edition: March 2009

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my daughter,

  Sophie Hustvedt Auster

  Don’t turn away.

  Keep looking at the bandaged place.

  That’s where the light enters you.

  —RUMI

  THE SORROWS

  OF AN AMERICAN

  My sister called it “the year of secrets,” but when I look back on it now, I’ve come to understand that it was a time not of what was there, but of what wasn’t. A patient of mine once said, “There are ghosts walking around inside me, but they don’t always talk. Sometimes they have nothing to say.” Sarah squinted or kept her eyes closed most of the time because she was afraid the light would blind her. I think we all have ghosts inside us, and it’s better when they speak than when they don’t. After my father died, I couldn’t talk to him in person anymore, but I didn’t stop having conversations with him in my head. I didn’t stop seeing him in my dreams or stop hearing his words. And yet it was what my father hadn’t said that took over my life for a while—what he hadn’t told us. It turned out that he wasn’t the only person who had kept secrets. On January sixth, four days after his funeral, Inga and I came across the letter in his study.

  We had stayed on in Minnesota with our mother to begin tackling the job of sifting through his papers. We knew that there was a memoir he had written in the last years of his life, as well as a box containing the letters he had sent to his parents—many of them from his years as a soldier in the Pacific during World War II—but there were other things in that room we had never seen. My father’s study had a particular smell, one slightly different from the rest of the house. I wondered if all the cigarettes he’d smoked and the coffee he’d drunk and the rings those endless cups had left on the desk over forty years had acted upon the atmosphere of that room to produce the unmistakable odor that hit me when I walked through the door. The house is sold now. A dental surgeon bought it and did extensive renovations, but I can still see my father’s study with its wall of books, the filing cabinets, the long desk he had built himself, and the plastic organizer on it, which despite its transparency had small handwritten labels on every drawer—“Paper Clips,” “Hearing Aid Batteries,” “Keys to the Garage,” “Erasers.”

  The day Inga and I began working, the weather outside was heavy. Through the large window, I looked at the thin layer of snow under an iron-colored sky. I could feel Inga standing behind me and hear her breathing. Our mother, Marit, was sleeping, and my niece, Sonia, had curled up somewhere in the house with a book. As I pulled open a file drawer, I had the abrupt thought that we were about to ransack a man’s mind, dismantle an entire life, and without warning a picture of the cadaver I had dissected in medical school came to mind, its chest cavity gaping open as it lay on the table. One of my lab partners, Roger Abbot, had called the body Tweedledum, Dum Dum, or just Dum. “Erik, get a load of Dum’s ventricle. Hypertrophy, man.” For an instant I imagined my father’s collapsed lung inside him, and then I remembered his hand squeezing mine hard before I left his small room in the nursing home the last time I saw him alive. All at once, I felt relieved he had been cremated.

  Lars Davidsen’s filing system was an elaborate code of letters, numbers, and colors devised to allow for a descending hierarchy within a single category. Initial notes were subordinate to first drafts, first drafts to final drafts, and so on. It wasn’t only his years of teaching and writing that were in those drawers, but every article he had written, every lecture he had given, the voluminous notes he had taken, and the letters he had received from colleagues and friends over the course of more than sixty years. My father had catalogued every tool that had ever hung in the garage, every receipt for the six used cars he had owned in his lifetime, every lawnmower, and every home appliance—the extensive documentation of a long and exceptionally frugal history. We discovered a list for itemized storage in the attic: children’s skates, baby clothes, knitting materials. In a small box, I found a bunch of keys. Attached to them was a label on which my father had written in his small neat hand: “Unknown Keys.”

  We spent days in that room with large black garbage bags, dumping hundreds of Christmas cards, grade books, and innumerable inventories of things that no longer existed. My niece and mother mostly avoided the room. Wired to a Walkman, Sonia ambled through the house, read Wallace Stevens, and slept in the comatose slumber that comes so easily to adolescents. From time to time she would come in to us and pat her mother on the shoulder or wrap her long thin arms around Inga’s shoulders to show silent support before she floated into another room. I had been worried about Sonia ever since her father died five years earlier. I remembered her standing in the hallway outside his hospital room, her face strangely impassive, her body stiffened against the wall, and her skin so white it made me think of bones. I know that Inga tried to hide her grief from Sonia, that when her daughter was at school my sister would turn on music, lie down on the floor, and wail, but I had never seen Sonia give in to sobs, and neither had her mother. Three years later, on the morning of September 11, 2001, Inga and Sonia had found themselves running north with hundreds of other people as they fled Stuyvesant High School, where Sonia was a student. They were just blocks from the burning towers, and it was only later that I discovered what Sonia had seen from her schoolroom window. From my house in Brooklyn that morning, I saw only smoke.

  When she wasn’t resting, our mother wandered from room to room, drifting around like a sleepwalker. Her determined but light step was no heavier than in the old days, but it had slowed. She would check on us, offer food, but she rarely crossed the threshold. The room must have reminded her of my father’s last years. His worsening emphysema shrank his world in stages. Near the end, he could barely walk anymore and kept mostly to the twelve by sixteen feet of the study. Before he died, he had separated the most important papers, which were now stored in a neat row of boxes beside his desk. It was in one of these containers that Inga found the letters from women my father had known before my mother. Later, I read every word they had written to him—a trio of premarital loves—a Margaret, a June, and a Lenore, all of whom wrote fluent but tepid letters signed “Love” or “With love” or “Until next time.”

  Inga’s hands shook when she found the bundles. It was a tremor I had been familiar with since childhood, not related to an illness but to what my sister called her wiring. She could never predict an onset. I had seen her lecture in public with quiet hands, and I had also seen her give talks when they trembled so violently she had to hide them behind her back. After withdrawing the three bunches of letters from the long-lost but once-desired Margaret, June, and Lenore, Inga pulled out a single sheet of paper, looked down at it with a puzzled expression, and without saying anything handed it to me.

  The letter was dated June 27, 1937. Beneath the date, in a large childish hand, was written: “Dear Lars, I know you will never ever say nothing about what happened. We swore it on the BIBLE. It can’t matter now she’s in heaven or to the ones here on earth. I believe in your promise. Lisa.”

  “He wanted us to find it,” Inga said. “If not, he would have destroyed it. I showed you those journals with the pages torn out of them.” She paused. “Have you ever heard of Lisa?”

  “No,” I said. “We could ask Mamma.”

  Inga answered me in Norwegian, as if the subject of our mother demanded that we use her first language. “Nei, Jei vil ikke forstyrre henne med dette.” (No, I won’t bother her with this.) “I’ve always felt,” she continued, “that there were things Pappa kept from Mamma and us, especially about his childhood. He was fifteen then. I think they’d already lost the forty acres of the farm, and unless I’m wrong, it was the year after Grandpa
found out his brother David was dead.” My sister looked down at the piece of pale brown paper. “ ‘It can’t matter now she’s in heaven or to the ones here on earth.’ Somebody died.” She swallowed loudly. “Poor Pappa, swearing on the Bible.”

  AFTER INGA, SONIA, and I had mailed eleven boxes of papers to New York City, most of them to my house in Brooklyn, and had returned to our respective lives, I was sitting in my study on a Sunday afternoon with my father’s memoir, letters, and small leather diary on the desk in front of me, and I recalled something Auguste Comte once wrote about the brain. He called it “a device by which the dead act upon the living.” The first time I held Dum’s brain in my hands, I was surprised first by its weight, and then by what I had suppressed—an awareness of the once-living man, a stocky seventy-year-old who had died of heart disease. When the man was alive, I thought, it was all here—internal pictures and words, memories of the dead and the living.

  Perhaps thirty seconds later, I looked through the window and saw Miranda and Eglantine for the first time. They were crossing the street with the real estate agent, and I knew immediately that they were prospective tenants for the ground floor of my house. The two women who lived in the garden apartment were leaving for a larger place in New Jersey, and I needed to fill the vacancy. After my divorce, the house seemed to grow. Genie had taken up a lot of space, and Elmer, her spaniel; Rufus, her parrot; and Carlyle, her cat, had occupied territory as well. For a while there were fish. After Genie left me, I used the three floors for my books, thousands of volumes that I couldn’t part with. My ex-wife had resentfully referred to our house as the Librarium. I had bought the brownstone as a so-called handyman special before my marriage when the market was low and have been working on it ever since. My passion for carpentry is a legacy of my father, who taught me how to build and repair just about anything. For years, I was holed up in one part of the house as I sporadically worked on the rest. The demands of my practice squeezed my leisure hours almost to nil, one of the factors that led to my joining that great legion of Western humanity known as “the divorced.”