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Lingering rifts of split families
By Francine Du Plessix Gray |
April 5, 2009, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
IMAGINE four little girls -- Jane and Maggy Cummins, Jenny and Patricia Stuart, two pairs of sisters, each pair about the same age -- who are deeply bonded to one another. And their glamorous mothers and fathers are the closest of friends.
In fact, Americans Paul and Helen Stuart and Australians Edward and Rosemary Cummins (both men foreign service officers) get so inseparable that they trade partners.
Jane Cummins (now Jane Alison) writes that the "split" left the four girls in shock - a "numb shock like a crack inside a stone." "We formed ourselves around the primary facts of the split," she explains, each girl building "a mass of fantasy, jealousy and longing that was crucial and would define us."
Jane was only four years old when the split occurred but as she grows older, the unease triggered by her parents' re-alliances is deepened by her attraction to her benign, sophisticated stepmother, who feeds her chocolate eclairs and talks to her about Jasper Johns.
The same sense of disloyalty haunts her because she feels closer to the swaggering Paul - as devoted a step-parent as one could hope for - than to her father, who is posted overseas during the years when Paul extensively also moves his new family, and whom she will not communicate with for seven years of her childhood.
It's upon this parallelism of destinies that Alison anchors her intermittently affecting memoir. Central to her narrative is the close friendship with her stepsister Jenny: the "antipodes" of the title is meant to denote the differences - and connections - between the two girls' characters.
Despite her stretch of harrowingly vivid boozing, drugging and one-night-standing, Jane graduates from Princeton with honors and becomes the family star as well as a professional success as the author of three novels.
But despite some fine passages, the book suffers from several faults, too often interrupted and muddled by ruminations about the effects on her psyche of her parents' philandering and musings interspersed with tedious speculation on the interaction of memory and narrative. Her traumas don't seem to have healed enough to be rendered in a consistently effective manner.
In fact, Americans Paul and Helen Stuart and Australians Edward and Rosemary Cummins (both men foreign service officers) get so inseparable that they trade partners.
Jane Cummins (now Jane Alison) writes that the "split" left the four girls in shock - a "numb shock like a crack inside a stone." "We formed ourselves around the primary facts of the split," she explains, each girl building "a mass of fantasy, jealousy and longing that was crucial and would define us."
Jane was only four years old when the split occurred but as she grows older, the unease triggered by her parents' re-alliances is deepened by her attraction to her benign, sophisticated stepmother, who feeds her chocolate eclairs and talks to her about Jasper Johns.
The same sense of disloyalty haunts her because she feels closer to the swaggering Paul - as devoted a step-parent as one could hope for - than to her father, who is posted overseas during the years when Paul extensively also moves his new family, and whom she will not communicate with for seven years of her childhood.
It's upon this parallelism of destinies that Alison anchors her intermittently affecting memoir. Central to her narrative is the close friendship with her stepsister Jenny: the "antipodes" of the title is meant to denote the differences - and connections - between the two girls' characters.
Despite her stretch of harrowingly vivid boozing, drugging and one-night-standing, Jane graduates from Princeton with honors and becomes the family star as well as a professional success as the author of three novels.
But despite some fine passages, the book suffers from several faults, too often interrupted and muddled by ruminations about the effects on her psyche of her parents' philandering and musings interspersed with tedious speculation on the interaction of memory and narrative. Her traumas don't seem to have healed enough to be rendered in a consistently effective manner.
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