Jane Hamilton: Disobedience

Doubleday

$34.95

Review: Jane Westaway*

A new Jane Hamilton novel is big news. Her first, The Book of Ruth, won a PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction.

The Book of Ruth and Hamilton's next novel, A Map of the World, were fired into the commercial stratosphere by Oprah Winfrey. Her third, A Short History of a Prince, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.

Hamilton's canvas for Disobedience is the city and her subject ordinary urban lives. Ordinary, that is, from the middle distance, but up close they are complex, eccentric and intense.

The narrator is Henry Shaw, perfect son turned whistle-blower. He sets up his mother's e-mail account and later stumbles into correspondence between her, her lover, violin player Richard Polloco, and her confidante, Jane. Shaw spends the next year monitoring to the point of obsession his mother's life and feelings and their impact on the now not-so-Shaw family.

The Shaws are comfortably off Chicago people who spend their summer holidays playing early music and performing ancient country dances. Henry refers to his mother variously as Mom, Beth, Mrs Shaw and Liza, as if unsure who she really is.

His father, Kevin, enthusiastically teaches history at a liberal private high school and encourages Henry's 13-year-old sister, Elvira, in her obsessional re-enacting of Civil War times.

Elvira is so forceful as to be worthy of her own novel. She is determined to be accepted as a young soldier-boy rather than play the traditional wench. At the wedding where her mother first meets her lover Elvira is decked out in uniform, complete with epaulets, red braid, plumed black hat and sabre.

All this highlights Henry's predicament as witness to his mother's betrayal, and his struggle with his feelings about a girl his own age.

It is what happens to Elvira when she binds her breasts to appear at yet another battle re-enactment that brings the Shaws, and particularly Beth, to their senses.

Disobedience is a compulsive read, and sure to bring Hamilton even more success. Something in me, though, remains less than whole-hearted.

It's a credit to Hamilton's writing that you keep turning pages despite misgivings about, for instance, what prompts Henry's electronic eavesdropping. Discovering your mother in the midst of a passionate affair might be enough to tip you into oedipal disarray, but it looks as if Henry had mother issues from way back and these are not acknowledged.

Because he narrates events 10 years later, his adult perspective undermines the sense of 17-year-old Henry's character. I wasn't convinced that a woman would write at such length and so lyrically (and informatively) to her best friend, nor that the final crisis was enough to send her back home.

The novel seems slightly overblown because of these hitches.Despite strong characterisation and good writing, Disobedience veers dangerously towards kitsch.

* Jane Westaway is a Wellington writer.