FICTION: The SentimentalistsBy Johanna Skibsrud Heinemann, 216pp. £12.99
WAR LEAVES LASTING wounds on the mind and in the memory, not only on the soldiers who survive but also on their families. The poet Johanna Skibsrud’s subtle yet candid first novel, which last year deservedly won the Giller Prize, Canada’s major literary award, confronts the aftermath of a Vietnam veteran’s experience and its impact on his wife and two daughters.
Napoleon Haskell returns from the war in which his best friend was killed, and can no longer live a normal family life. He retreats from his emotions and instead devotes his time to working on a boat that he claims is for his wife. The boat takes over from the house he was supposed to be building. The narrator, the younger daughter, describes the boat as “a last symbol of the one-time greatness” of her mother’s expectations.
The family is caught up in the father’s efforts to flee from his past. Skibsrud is a calm writer, and her prose is detailed, rather formal, but the emotional power is relentless. A sense of longing courses through the narrative, yet the irony of the title is well served; this is an intelligent, reserved novel, and is all the more moving for the restrained dignity that conveys not only the regrets but also the anger.
“When my father finally disappeared from us in the summer when I was twelve – after years of false starts, in which he spent his winters out west, returning to us later and later each year with the spring – the boat was moved, along with us, to my grandmother’s house.”
The story that emerges is one of a man on the run from himself while his family spend years waiting for normal life to resume. Somehow the narrator retains our sympathy for her father while leaving no doubts about the damage his behaviour does to her and her mother; Helen, the other sister, emerges as slightly more detached.
There are echoes of the calm, deliberate tone of Richard Ford's Wildlife(1990), in that a grown child is engaged in the act of remembering. There is no judgment. Skibsrud is superb at evoking memory, the way random flashbacks dart into the mind and entire scenes are recalled with the vividness of a photograph. The family waited for the father to return, and eventually "in the same way, I suppose, that for the drowning man there comes, the several times he raises himself above the surface, the irrefutable moment in which it is certain that he will not raise himself again . . . we gave up".
Napoleon moves from place to place. He seems to be trying to find personal peace, but behind his restlessness is the need to find the father of his friend Owen Carey, who was killed in Vietnam. Eventually he locates him. “My father had discovered Henry after an eight year search that began the day my sister Helen was born.” The old man becomes central to the disconnected family; the narrator and her sister regard Henry as an unofficial grandfather. The old man lives just over the border in Canada.
Throughout the novel Skibsrud makes effective use of the idea of moving between Canada and the US, the closeness, the distance. Henry provides sanctuary for Napoleon and later for the narrator. After she discovers the man she had been living with for six years in bed with another woman she flees and ends up at Henry’s house.
The scenes in which she observes her father and his dead friend’s father are brilliantly handled. There are flashes of perfection in this muted novel. There is also an ironic humour. Throughout the horrors the narrator can see the comedy of simply trying to live. “In fits and starts my father’s search for Henry Carey – father of the late Owen Carey – had been orchestrated in all the states of the union. He did not think to look in Canada.”
Napoleon is a hopeless case: likeable, alcoholic and disorganised, not so much a dreamer as a convincingly drawn lost soul. The narrator faced with the old man he has become remembers his younger self. He too is aware of what has happened. “ ‘How does the time pass so goddamn quickly?’ my father asked often, out loud. ‘I wasn’t consulted . . . I can tell you that much. If I had been it wouldn’t have happened so fast. You know how old you two would be if I was in charge?’ ” When the narrator asks “how old?” her father’s answer is blunt and moving: “Eight. You’d both be eight . . . All kids should stay eight years old for ever.” Elsewhere the narrator refers to having learned from her mother “that it was foolish to ask for too much out of life, afterwards only to live in the wake of that expectation.”
A philosophical intensity often surfaces; this is a thoughtful novel, reflecting on many dark issues. Yet all the while Skibsrud is guiding the personal story towards a darker one: that of war. Napoleon is a good talker, and offers ramshackle bits of anecdotes, but the one memory he refuses to revisit is of his stint in Vietnam. He dismisses it in a devastating comment: “We were just like elephants, crashing around. Elephants, working for the government. Wanting coffee and smokes.”
When the story of what actually happened emerges it takes the form of a deep breath that is finally expelled. The US army did not leave Vietnam as heroes. This collective horror has inspired some outstanding novels; this is one of them. Told by a narrator whose father went there to fight, experienced all the shame and returned haunted, The Sentimentalistsis an allusive, intelligent and solemn work that articulates one man's horror and the way it became a communal lamentation.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
