The Condition

I'm a sucker for sweeping family stories, and if they involve the so-called intellectual elite of New England, so much the better. It's a familiar, comfortable and comforting image, even when the families turn out to be dysfuntional or vaguely freaky. Jennifer Haigh's The Condition takes place around MIT in Cambridge, MA, Concord, MA, NYC, and takes a quick dip down to "the islands" (I'm too lazy to be more precise). Although it is nominally about Gwen McKotch's "condition", a rare genetic mutation that leaves her a pre-pubescent, it's really about getting old (or older) Reading about the meandering, increasingly meaningless lives of the elder McKotches, Gwen's parents, will probably feed all sorts of unhealthy fantasies in young people who have always hoped their divorced parents would get back together, but it's kind of nice. Frank McKotch, as an older man, should also serve as warning to anyone still toiling as a scientific postdoc past the age of, say, 30... (or to anyone married to a postdoc). And yes, I did skim some of the genetic code stuff that was mostly a collection of captital letters and numbers. (Okay, I kind of get it...)

There are other characters, of course. There's Gwen, a 34 year old woman who apparently looks like a 10 year old boy (and behaves like a sullen teenager), there's the "good son" who is---gasp!---gay! And can't come out to his New Englandy, Yankee "we-don't-talk-about-money-or- emotions" family! And then there's sad sack, loser Scott, who gets to find his footing by, well, pretty much betraying his sister. Oh yeah. and by self-diagnosing his ADHD.

I liked this book, though not nearly as much as I did Haigh's Baker's Towers (fantastic!), but I felt I was kind of in the wrong stage of life to really love it. I liked seeing Frank and Paulette realize that getting old with someone familiar might outweigh the negatives of emotional intimacy. Paulette is a bit shocked when she sees her ex-husband looking so aged but realizes:...she had known him young and handsome, his athlete's shoulders, the square cut of his jaw. In her mind, the two pictures blended together. The result was something infinitely kinder than what a stranger saw. She's also thinking of herself, and how she has aged, when she adds: No woman of fifty-six should have to undress for a new lover. She should be spared that anguish.

Frank, for his part, discovers late what all single moms have always known: basically, it stinks to be sick (or have your car break down, or your kid sick, or your house need a total emergency overhaul) when you're alone.

I thought these two were the most believable characters.

I don't know if I totally understand what someone might see in Gwen, but she finds her own in the end, and I kind of like that she still remains a mystery to the reader and to her family.

Scott goes from annoying little kid to Mr. Responsible (sort of), but he's still a terrible father and Haigh kind of drops that thread of redemption while she tidies almost everything else up, more or less plausibly.

Part I loved:

Scott comes home to find that he's lost his wife to an online chat room participant when she signed in using her maiden name.

Scott nodded thoughtfully, grasping too late the value of the patriarchal tradition, why for centuries women had taken their husbands' names. To guard their virtue in online chat rooms. To keep away horny long-lost stepbrothers, lovelorn since childhood, lying in wait.

Ah, marriage, ah the patriarchal tradition. Wouldn't that just solve everything?