Race and Reunion

...LIKE THE melodramatic Before and After, whose characters—the truthseeking mother, the defiantly evidencedestroying father—were conceived as unchanging embodiments of conflicting attitudes rather than fluid human beings with overlapping needs, Half a Heart suffers from an architecture of polarities, shaped here by race...

...As types, the Veners and their friends can be extremely funny at certain moments or illuminated by felicitous phrases...

...Beyond the range of Miriam's black-and-white vision of the world there are a whole range of climbers and idealists: blacks and whites, esthetes, politicos, bigots, materialists—sometimes the bad and the good, consumer and dreamer, inhabiting one and the same body...

...He'd convinced Miriam that the child should be raised black and she, all too prey to white guilt, had acquiesced...

...As characters, however, they are never allowed to resist the author's puppeteering...

...She is anxious to get the tuition money he can't provide (her secret reason for looking up her mother...

...This is no sooner said than it is broadened rhetorically into: "That, of course, was turning out to be the question of the century, not simply of her love affair with Eljay Reece: How much love, how much compassion do we owe in return for struggle and pain...

...Her activist juices are flowing again...

...In the exquisite and wrenching Tender Mercies (1978), the husband has virtually cut his wife in half in a motorboat accident, a horrifyingly literal enactment of a cleavage both physical and psychological as well as temporal...

...Now settled all too comfortably in a white Houston enclave with her successful doctor husband and three children, Miriam still experiences spasms of longing for the baby she surrendered to her lover Eljay back when they both taught at a Mississippi college...

...Say what...

...Reviewed by Molly Haskell Rim critic and author Rosellen Brown's best-selling novel, Before and After (1992), describes the devastating effect on a family when the teenage son accidentally kills his girlfriend and becomes a fugitive from justice...

...We are asked to believe that this once passionate demonstrator and academic would embrace—or at least enthusiastically settle for—a sort of white-flight life among rich and complacent suburban types: intellectually somnolent Houstonians, "bottle blondes" and a sprinkling of Jews...

...Brown's irony deflects but doesn't quite take the sting out of Miriam's nastiness toward her husband, whose common sense virtuousness she sees as a mark of limited imagination...

...It never occurs to the strangely naïve Miriam that her daughter has an ulterior purpose, but the mother is less than courageous herself when it comes to acknowledging her daughter...

...A poet as well as a novelist, Brown is one of our most gifted writers, wise and humorous with an acute sense of paradox: ? ver and over she acknowledges the absurdity, the impossibility, of this attempt to communicate, as well as the desperate need to go on trying, but the sense of complexity and paradox is more evident in her authorial insights than in the broad brushstrokes of characterization...

...Brown deserves points for bravery in attacking head-on what is possibly the most difficult dilemma facing America today: How can blacks and whites engage in a conversation, find any sort of equilibrium that isn't instantly upended by programmed emotions and hardened reflexes, by revenge and separatism on the one hand, by guilt and condescension and conciliation on the other...

...The stage is set for a reunion: Miriam will pick up Ronnee—she long ago rejected the fancy "Veronica"—and take her to the Veners' cabin in New Hampshire...

...The difference between a felt, genuinely particular relationship and one that is politically pointed is the difference between Miriam and Ronnee's color-coordinated struggles on the one hand, and, on the other...

...Perhaps the situation is itself too Oprahtic, too rife with metaphor, too laden with the weight of America's racial impasse...

...Over the years, Ronnee has resisted the intimidating pressures of her black power father—applying on her own to a private mostly-white school to get a decent education, following an apolitical bent for the theater, and now, having been accepted at Stanford on partial scholarship, vowing to go to there over her father's objections...

...There the orneriness of the mother, the exasperation of the daughter, the warring and loving intelligences of both yield some of the best writing in the book...

...It is not that the prose of this supremely skilled writer is ever flat...

...In fact, neither Jewel's blasts of logic, nor Miriam's own self-accusations quite compensate for the abysmal gaps in Miriam's reasoning and impulses, the credibility gulf between the simpering doormat Miriam and the skeptical "what a crock...

...Miriam's children are off at camp, and she decides to track down Veronica, who, from the apartment she shares with her father in Brooklyn, has coincidentally been trying to find her lost mother...

...Comically dismissive of her corroding, even fatuous social conscience, Miriam is the designated radical of the group, given to futile spurts of anger at her smug friends...

...But the title could serve most of her novels, focusing as they do on a cataclysmic event that spotlights family tensions and radically changes things forever, like red dye poured into a colorless liquid...

...Miriam and Barry are Sensibility and Sense, walking oppositions, like Miriam and Eljay, antithetical elements in a laboratory experiment...

...In Civil Wars (1984), a liberal, racially idealistic wife living in an integrated Southern neighborhood must adopt the children of her reactionary in-laws when the mother and father are killed...

...The trip is awkward, amusing, full of deep skepticism on the daughter's side and, on the mother's, a helpless yearning to connect...

...But if she had, we would not have the Guess-Who's-Coming-to-Dinner denouement in which Ronnee is introduced at a coming-out party and thereafter makes her way into the Veners' uppermiddle-class Houston milieu...

...Miriam...

...Even as Miriam is deeply and self-punishingly uncomfortable with her life, she is perversely comfortable with it...

...Miriam's unfathomable behavior with Eljay, the entire sequence where she becomes pregnant, decides to have and then give up the baby, remains inexplicable and is underscored by Brown's defensive writing...

...Finally, the moment Miriam has been waiting for...

...A music professor, Miriam's lover was charismatic to begin with and newly armed with messianic SNCC credentials...

...To me, the most chilling moment of the book is when we realize that Miriam's self-hatred, extended to her Houston life, embraces not only her "friends" but her husband and children as well, the latter seen as second best and inauthentic because they are white...

...The climax arrives when Ronnee and her white boyfriend, caught in a seedy section of town in his sister's car, are arrested for car theft and Ronnee is mauled and manhandled in a Houston jail...

...She intends to file charges even though the publicity would cause havoc to her family, mortify Ronnee, and be an exercise in futility...

...The heat in Houston is stifling...

...Now she regrets her weakness every day in what she sees, rather horrifyingly, as a "replacement life" with "replacement children' and a replacement love...

...It haunted him like a doom, like a selffulfilling curse," Miriam says...

...There are in each precious mother-daughter encounter layers of richly inhabited, pulsating life, of specific yet identifiable tribal and family traits, a sense of characters so lived-in that their mutual story is a tiny gem of a novel within the novel...

...Eljay does not want the child, but the very sight of a pregnant teenager with no access to abortion drives the inanely compassionate Miriam to go ahead with her own pregnancy...

...Miriam should have fought for her little brown child, forgiveness be damned...

...Jewel arrives to knock some sense into her head, lashing out not only at the selfindulgence of Miriam's cry for "justice," but at the condescension inherent in her contempt for her "dungeon"—the luxurious house and circumstances, her material well-being...

...Later, with Veronica between them, she gives way to Eljay's belligerence while inwardly ridiculing his "sloganeering...

...This highly topical what-if fable, reminiscent of British director Mike Leigh's white motherblack daughter film, Secrets and Lies, chronicles the social and psychological fallout when a mother and child with different colored skin but the same intractable curly-hair gene, meet for the first time in their adult lives...

...memories dance in her head of those '60s highs, the physical closeness and excitement of bodies crushed together, marching, hugging...

...Suggestive of the novel's contrivance is the too-neat, toocomplete bifurcation of Miriam's life...

...Just so...

...Miriam's hand is forced when a crisis in her ailing mother's health requires her to return to Houston and Ronnee insists on accompanying her...

...Half a Heart's, tangential but vivid love story of Miriam and her dying mother...

...But in Miriam's scenes with her mother, and thoughts about her coming death, the novel's all-purpose, prime time friendly artifice falls away...

...Then, dazzlingly, "She had never been sure how much forgiveness its outrages ought to buy him...

...Although her longsuffering husband is aware of the situation, she has never told her children, her friends, her New Hampshire neighbors, and simply plops the young woman into an alien world hoping for the best...

...Most blacks, Jewel points out, wouldbe happy to have a piece of it and would greatly resent Miriam's privileged martyrdom...

...Has the putatively progressive Miriam never heard of contraception...

...She accepts the riches of her large and glaringly well-furnished house, while never letting herself or her husband forget that their carpets were "created by dozens of small subcontinental children hunched double making knots, a lifetime of knots," a description that rightly drives her husband Barry "berserk"—although he seems to have been initially attracted, and is still in thrall, to her bullying idealism...

...Not surprisingly Jewel, and all the friends Miriam once loved and protested with, have been consigned to oblivion so that Miriam the apostate can live a life of self-reproach and reverse racism among pallid Texans...

...And perhaps the price of the experiment is not only Miriam's suffering but the distortions, the twists and turns in Rosellen Brown's perception of her, giving with one hand, taking away with the other...

...But the life-style choice rings hollow, a setup in which Brown plays a double game, allowing Miriam to retain a feeling of superiority to her provincial world, as long as she lets herself off the hook by condemning her own snobbery...

...A bit of a sitcom guardian angel, but no less welcome for that, Jewel is a gutsy, funny black colleague and lesbian who was Miriam's best friend...

...DURING THE account of Miriam's Mississippi days, our exasperation at Miriam's dumb side is voiced by the delightfully no-nonsense Jewel, who punctures Miriam's phony idealism...

...As a rich Jewish girl, she is at a perpetual moral disadvantage before Eljay's impossibly harsh childhood and history of discrimination...

...And not just blacks, I would add, but a great many whites...

...Sometimes she felt she'd been part of an experiment to find that out...

...It is the summer of 1986...

...More often than not it is virtuosic—a passage in which Miriam listens to and describes Ronnee's unique speech noises is beautifully rendered...

...The node point of Brown's latest novel, Half a Heart, is the birth of a biracial daughter to Miriam Vener, Jewish housewife and one-time social activist, 17 years before the story begins...