Nancy Huston, Lignes de Faille (2006)

You may already know from previous posts how much I love Nancy Huston’s essays. As a Canadian writer living in Paris for two decades and writing in French (and English, her mother tongue), she writes about being a woman, a mother, a writer, a foreigner with courage and an original voice. This is the first time I try her novels. This story (whose title I could translate as “fault lines” or “rifts”, since I don’t know whether it’s been published in English as well) spans over 60 years and 4 generations of a family. It is structured around a literary trick: it is told backwards in 4 parts focusing on each generation of the family. Moreover, each part is told by one of the family member at age 6. 

We have Sol in 2004, an egocentric brat growing up in America, bombarded with internet images and believing he’s as powerful as God. We have Randall, Sol’s father, in 1982, whose parents decide to live in Israel for his mother’s research project just before the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps. We have Sadie, Randall’s mother, in 1962, a terribly insecure and unhappy little girl brought up by her very rigid grandparents in Canada and who dreams to go live with her mother, a kind of bohemian singer who don’t really care for her. Last, we have Kristina, Sadie’s mother, a gifted little girl in a German village at the end of the WWII and discovering in 1944 the secret around her birth.

 I won’t spoil any secret here, but indeed the mystery works very well, as each child has a limited vision and comprehension of the adult world, sometimes miscomprehending, sometimes reading emotions between his parents and grandparents better than a grown-up. It’s the kind of book you want to reread immediately after you get to the last page, as you think you may get more the second time around. I encountered this literary structure choice several times, such as in Amis’ Time’s Arrow and Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch, but here it flows quite naturally, as each section takes a snapshot of events and relationships 20 years apart from the next one, and from the beginning, you’re introduced to all characters of the story.

The voice of the child at each period is beautifully rendered, in its immediacy, simple language, fears and obsessions. You get into the mind of 4 children, each eager to grow up, eager to earn his parents’ love and attention. Children are always terribly serious in their endeavors, even if adults around them dismiss them as children plays. The parents seem to have completely forgotten what it was like to be a child, but you, the reader, can see some hints from their childhood showing up through their adult choices and reactions. It’s a beautiful reflection on what is transmitted or lost from your parents and how a family secret in the past can resonate across generations. Besides, it deals with world events (WWII and Nazi crimes, Israel / Palestine, Irak war and torture in American prisons there…) that make this particular family’s history a bumpy ride through the 20^th century darker moments. The events that each child witnesses when he’s merely 6 will mold him into an adult that won’t ever be completely healed.

The only weak point is the first child we get to meet: Sol is spoilt, sure of himself, uncaring about the people around him, and horribly obsessed with sex and violent images from Internet while her mother naively worships him and overprotects him. Is that what the author thinks of American children? The political charge against war in Irak is radical. It’s easy for the French audience to generalize and imagine that all American parents are puritans, naïve and overprotective while they bring up potential little monsters. I think that Huston wants to explain how such a kid may be the result of a series of breaking points in previous generations, but starting with such a portrait may put off a lot of readers. And I’m not sure an American publisher will run the risk to publish such a scathing story.