Family Entanglements

...Fox has earned the right, though, to leave larger mysteries unanswered, to proceed by indirection in suggesting what set the childrens' teeth on edge, how Alma, in the words of Rilke, "pleased a terror" in order to give birth to her barren brood...

...and Laura's daughter Clara, 29, who enters into this rare encounter with her mother with a "distressed excitement" that becomes increasingly understandable...

...Similarly, Laura recalls coming home from school with her brothers in New York, yet Carlos must have been close to 30 and Eugenio not much younger...

...Now, each is a scavenger-she for money, Carlos for young boys, Eugenio for social status among the rich clients he serves as a travel agent...

...Still, such resolution as she offers is not of itself enough to rid the reader of his disgust for the three Maldonadas-"like dinosaurs sinking into the tar pits, flailing about," Clara says...

...When she decides to please, she will forgive them their fear of her...

...In its purpose, and in execution when Paula Fox remains on the scene she knows so well, The Widow's Children is remarkable...

...Clara, the youngest member, knows after she has grown up that "she had not been placed in the wrong crib...

...But Laura is a law unto herself...

...As Eugenio asks, "When one forgets the past, there is nothing, is there...

...Yet he is too self-protective, too dependent on her mother, to act on his understanding until after the party has disbanded in disarray...

...Dutton, 224 pp., $8.95), the latest novel by Paula Fox, do we realize how aptly her intention is expressed by the epigraph she has taken from Rainer Maria Rilke...

...For Peter S. Prescott, another critic, the novel was "admirable, not likeable...

...The fore?ground story follows the Maldonada family (the name suggests their deprivation...

...It is not in this gray area that we sense the past falls apart, rather on occasions when Fox has been unnecessarily specific, with someone's age given here, a date or two there, until the most unobservant read?er is disturbed by anachronisms and improbabilities...

...Con?stantly, and with great emotional force, she moves from their aging bodies, "warm, sweating hands," drunken maundering, to a time when everything seemed possible...

...The early reviews I have read did not recognize this challenge...

...Nevertheless, it is their entangle?ment in family ties, more than their forlorn freedom from them, that shapes their destinies...

...she wouldn't be "interested...

...memories fail, legends take over, these dreamers of lost wealth are unreliable narrators...

...An ambitious novel, as I have said, with a larger intention than I had at first realized...

...Yet I think the terror lay not there, but in the Maldonadas' denial of their faith...

...Notwithstanding the difficulties the critics seem to have had in deciding exactly how to take the novel, Fox's narrative is neither obscure nor cryptic...

...But elsewhere we are told that they left Cuba after the father's death-in other words, sometime after 1920, when Laura was born...

...Peter leaves home after midnight to visit Carlos and Eugenio, and then-disobeying Laura-calls on Clara to persuade her to attend her grandmother's funeral the next day...

...There are a good many such discrepancies, and the reader making the tedious calculations they demand does not quibble about a few years...

...As a child, Alma liked to visit churches and synagogues: perhaps in death, Carlos jokes, she "was returning to the bosom of Abraham...

...Laura shares with her brothers a declasse glamor, as they hang on to memories, or reports of memories, of their once wealthy and powerful Spanish family...

...Yet it is a measure of her impressive ambition that his lines stand sentinel over her work-that she dares in this short, rather brittle social novel, to be judged by their implications...

...She speaks of her descent "from Jews and gypsies" in such a rakish way, however, that the possibility seems preposterous...

...It consists of an odd combination of traditional elements (with her puritanical Jamesian ambassador in a transplanted European scene...

...When she came from Barcelona to Cuba as a beautiful girl of 16 to meet her husband, she was not prepared for the brutalites of plantation life...

...Even Irving Howe, who found it "one of the best novels written in America these past 20 or 30 years," set The Widow's Children in "a tradition of Wharton and Fitzgerald" when he might better have spoken of Fox's indebtedness to the master, Henry James...

...They and their friends would be unbearable if Fox did not provide the background of their youth and beauty, when they were vigorous and optimistic...

...they are "badly bestowed") for 24 hours in New York City...

...everything else burned to the ground...

...Peter RICE, who wears his decency with great embarrassment (although he sets limits on Laura's out?rages in his presence), sees in Clara a victim to be rescued...

...Actually, Clara has been the most involved with Alma: Laura abandoned her at birth to a dreary childhood in her grandmother's custody, where she lived, she recalls, like "the other boarders in the House of Atreus...

...Laura explodes in a passion of rage and a kind of grief, and asks Peter to deliver the news of Alma's death to her brothers...

...Everyone had trouble, but it is clear that she came late to the realization...

...old friend Peter Rice, a cultured and rather bloodless book editor who has long cherished in Laura a primitive outlawry ab?sent in his dry and disappointed life...

...But, in summoning up the past, the author falters in precisely the command of detail and concrete reality that is her greatest strength when rendering the present...

...She is under no obligation, of course, to provide a genealogy...

...She rages at blacks and mocks the Jews, despite a fact we soon guess: The Maldonadas are themselves Jewish...

...Howe also domesticated and diminished the book's strangeness by describing its concern with "the nettles that must accumulate in the bosom of family life," as if Fox were dealing with the family next door...

...and appeals to our long-standing fascination with the witch, the fam?ily curse, the changeling...

...The tension that is the natural weather whenever Laura is present is intensified on this occasion by her possession of a secret: Her mother, Alma-the widow of the title??has just died in a nursing home...

...With characteristic economy she quotes only the beginning of his poem "Widow": "Deprived of their first leaves her barren children stand, and seem, for all the world, to have been born because she pleased some terror" The rest of the short poem moves away from the children to the mother, but Fox is a novelist, not a poet, and her characters -a widow's aging offspring with willfull perversity of their own-have made demands on her quite as urgent as Rilke's larger vision...

...He still is not to tell Clara...

...Karl Miller came closer to grasping the scope of the book in quoting Stuart Hampshire on "the genealogy of misfortunes that pass across the generations as an inherited punishment," and in speaking of all the characters, whatever their age, as "outcast" and "outlaw" orphans...

...To take two examples, according to Eugenio the Span?ish-American War of 1898 loosened the Maldonadas' grip on their Cuban plantation, sending Alma and the children to the States with the money from the sale of the great house...

...These critics agree in their respect for Fox's writing, and through their separate interests they approach her originality...

...Such a perverse impulse is, for Laura, merely a slightly exaggerated instance of her mysterious approach to life, an attitude that frightens and astonishes the others...

...a missing decade or two is another matter entirely...

...He is motivated not simply by his desire to liberate himself and Clara, but also by what might be termed a religious need to honor the dead, to respect the possibility of family continuity...

...Fox's design, then, is straightforward-indeed, with its party at the outset and its funeral at the end, the novel is conventionally structured...

...a stylish appreciation of contemporary urban life...

...It is as if concentration on the contemporary scene had exhausted her...

...Laura will not give to Carlos, her other brother Eugenio or to Clara the "pleasure," the release from the guilt of neglecting Alma, the return of memories that impart?ing this intelligence would provide...

...the author's single purpose, he decided, was "to turn each scene into a compression chamber"-a plausible response only if one is distracted by Fox's preoccupation with suffocation and nausea...

...It is clear that for all her freedom from ordinary feelings, Laura envies her daughter the care she received from Alma...

...Gathered for drinks in a hotel room and dinner later in a midtown restau?rant are the hosts-Laura, a flamboyant, "elemental" and uninhibited Maldonada of 55, and her rich and dissolute second husband-and their guests: Laura's elderly homosexual brother, Carlos...