Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett review – lessons of a painful past

Adam Haslett is a rising American superstar, his short stories (shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize) and novels, including awards nominees 2010’s Union Atlantic and 2016’s Imagine Me Gone, garnering excitable praise from the likes of Ann Patchett and Andrew Sean Greer. His latest novel, the Turgenev echoing Mothers and Sons, packs a powerful punch which will secure his reputation.

Peter is an overworked 40-year-old asylum lawyer working for a small nonprofit in New York. His day-to day is filled with desperate immigrants who see him as their one last hope for residential status; he is caught in a tide of the broken, the discarded, the tortured and abused. However, he generally manages to maintain a professional distance from his clients, adhering to the limitations of his role.

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He has “learned to live with it”, as his stoic boss describes the best way to cope with the work. His personal life is one of isolation and solitude, except for regular rendezvous with a man who is keen for a deeper relationship than Peter can commit to. A master at keeping people at a distance, he is surprised when a client, Vasil, a vulnerable young gay asylum seeker, truly gets under his skin. (The lives of refugees are brought into sharp focus; one shudders to imagine the future of the system under new management.)

Ann, an ex-minister (of the divine kind) is Peter’s mother. She helps run a women’s retreat in rural Vermont. She frets over Peter’s absence from her life but has found contentment and purpose since she left his father. Where Peter’s days are high-octane and chaotic, Ann’s are slow, reflective and ritualistic.

The book switches between their perspectives throughout, each chapter hinting further at memories they have buried and secrets that have bound them. They are reunited when Peter’s work with Vasil provokes a violent, traumatising memory from his youth, and the years of damaging fallout require honest investigation by both.

What Haslett does especially well is excavate the emotional inner lives of his characters. We feel their pain, we long for broken connections to be welded back together. Peter has buried his feelings under a mountain of work and superficial relationships, but there is much to unearth, and as Haslett does so, the more Peter’s hesitations are understood. 

The final third of the book has the pace and revelation of a thriller. Ann may believe that “history is a mess” but Haslett shows quite brilliantly how the past can deliver blows decades on, and that sometimes a step backwards is what it takes to be properly in the present.

Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett is out now (Penguin, £20). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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