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Summary
Summary
From Jane Hamilton, author of the belovedNew York TimesbestsellersA Map of the WorldandThe Book of Ruth, comes a warmly humorous, poignant novel about a young man, his mother's e-mail, and the often surprising path of infidelity. Henry Shaw, a high school senior, is about as comfortable with his family as any seventeen-year-old can be. His father, Kevin, teaches history with a decidedly socialist tinge at the Chicago private school Henry and his sister attend. His mother, Beth, who plays the piano in a group specializing in antique music, is a loving, attentive wife and parent. Henry even accepts the offbeat behavior of his thirteen-year-old sister, Elvira, who is obsessed with Civil War reenactments and insists on dressing in handmade Union uniforms at inopportune times. When he stumbles on his mother's e-mail account, however, Henry realizes that all is not as it seems. There, under the name Liza38, a name that Henry innocently established for her, is undeniable evidence that his mother is having an affair with one Richard Polloco, a violin maker and unlikely paramour who nonetheless has a very appealing way with words and a romantic spirit that, in Henry's estimation, his own father woefully lacks. Against his better judgment, Henry charts the progress of his mother's infatuation, her feelings of euphoria, of guilt, and of profound, touching confusion. His knowledge of Beth's secret life colors his own tentative explorations of love and sex with the ephemeral Lily, and casts a new light on the arguments-usually focused on Elvira-in which his parents regularly indulge. Over the course of his final year of high school, Henry observes each member of the family, trying to anticipate when they will find out about the infidelity and what the knowledge will mean to each of them. Henry's observations, set down ten years after that fateful year, are much more than the "old story" of adultery his mother deemed her affair to be. With her inimitable grace and compassion, Jane Hamilton has created a novel full of gentle humor and rich insights into the nature of love and the deep, mysterious bonds that hold families together.
Summary
From Jane Hamilton, author of the beloved New York Times bestsellers A Map of the World and The Book of Ruth , comes a warmly humorous, poignant novel about a young man, his mother's e-mail, and the often surprising path of infidelity.
Henry Shaw, a high school senior, is about as comfortable with his family as any seventeen-year-old can be. His father, Kevin, teaches history with a decidedly socialist tinge at the Chicago private school Henry and his sister attend. His mother, Beth, who plays the piano in a group specializing in antique music, is a loving, attentive wife and parent. Henry even accepts the offbeat behavior of his thirteen-year-old sister, Elvira, who is obsessed with Civil War
reenactments and insists on dressing in handmade Union uniforms at inopportune times.
When he stumbles on his mother's e-mail account, however, Henry realizes that all is not as it seems. There, under the name Liza38, a name that Henry innocently established for her, is undeniable evidence that his mother is having an affair with one Richard Polloco, a violin maker and unlikely paramour who nonetheless has a very appealing way with words and a romantic spirit that, in Henry's estimation, his own father woefully lacks.
Against his better judgment, Henry charts the progress of his mother's infatuation, her feelings of euphoria, of guilt, and of profound, touching confusion. His knowledge of Beth's secret life colors his own tentative explorations of love and sex with the ephemeral Lily, and casts a new light on the arguments-usually focused on Elvira-in which his parents regularly indulge. Over the course of his final year of high school, Henry observes each member of the family, trying to anticipate when they will find out about the infidelity and what the knowledge will mean to each of them.
Henry's observations, set down ten years after that fateful year, are much more than the "old story" of adultery his mother deemed her affair to be. With her inimitable grace and compassion, Jane Hamilton has created a novel full of gentle humor and rich insights into the nature of love and the deep, mysterious bonds that hold families together.
Author Notes
Jane Hamilton was born in 1957. She is the author of The Book of Ruth, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction. A Map of the World, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year was named one of the top ten books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, The Miami Herald, and People. Both The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World have been selections of Oprah's Book Club. A Map of the World was recently made into a major motion picture, starring Sigourney Weaver and Julianne Moore. Her work, The Short History of a Prince, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998.
She lives in Rochester, Wisconsin.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Jane Hamilton was born in 1957. She is the author of The Book of Ruth, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction. A Map of the World, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year was named one of the top ten books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, The Miami Herald, and People. Both The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World have been selections of Oprah's Book Club. A Map of the World was recently made into a major motion picture, starring Sigourney Weaver and Julianne Moore. Her work, The Short History of a Prince, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998.
She lives in Rochester, Wisconsin.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Credit Hamilton with courage, virtuosity and a remarkable ability to reflect inner lives. Her first novel, The Book of Ruth, was the unsparing story of a girl trapped in woeful circumstances; the protagonist of her second, The Map of the World, was a woman responsible for a child's death; the narrator of The Short History of a Prince was a gay man. Here she again explores family bonds and tensions, the demands of sexuality and the ethics of betrayal (not an oxymoron)Dthis time from the point of view of a teenager who discovers that his mother is having an affair. Henry Shaw is a high school senior when he intercepts e-mail messages between his mother, Beth, a musician and specialist in ancient music, and violin maker Richard Pollico. As he secretly eavesdrops on the liaison between "Liza38" and "Rpol," Henry's emotions, ranging from horror to fear of abandonment to rage to deep sadness, take on a new dimension when he himself falls in love with a girl he meets in summer camp. Meanwhile, his generally bemused and patient father, Kevin, a high school history teacher, seems unaware of Beth's infidelity, since he spends much of his time coaching Henry's rebellious sister, Elvira, 13, who is obsessed with her desire to join a Civil War reenactment disguised as a boy. A mirror image of A Short History's protagonist, Walter, at the same age, Elvira displays an unhappiness with her gender that causes stress in the Shaw's marriage. As she has amply demonstrated before, Hamilton knows the nuances of domestic relationships and the landscape of teenage uncertainty. Henry's voice is exactly right: he's a thoughtful, intelligent boy whose hormones are sending him confusing messages, and whose tendency is to mock both parents with typical teen sardonic humor. Henry's funny quips are actually quite sad, because they mask his sorrow at the severing of his close bond with his mother, and his discomfort at secretly being aware of her illicit passion. Beth's joyous reaction to physical love and her anguish at how her behavior, if revealed, might affect her family, are likewise rendered with compassion. In a miracle of empathy, Hamilton manages to grant psychological validity to all the members of this ordinary-seeming but emotionally distracted family, and to strike the reader's heart with her tender evocation of both human fallibility and our ability to recover from heartbreaking choices. Author tour. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Disobedience takes forms great and small in Hamilton's new family drama. The Shaws have just left Vermont for Chicago. Kevin is an affable and optimistic high-school teacher. Beth is an accomplished pianist. Henry, Hamilton's complicated narrator, is a mild-mannered and lonely high school senior. And Elvira, his tomboy little sister (and the novel's most charismatic character), is a hard-core Civil War reenactor who disguises herself as a boy while on the field and wishes she was one. Henry has inadvertently opened his mother's e-mail and discovered that she's having an affair with a violin player who lives in a log cabin just over the Wisconsin border. This knowledge frightens, angers, and intrigues him since he is in the throes of his first passionate relationship. As Henry ponders the mysteries of love, sex, marriage, and duty, Hamilton subtly questions the very notion of disobedience. Should one disobey the heart's desires to protect others? Is any one person in the wrong when relationships run aground? Hamilton's characters are magnetic, their predicaments are unexpected and wholly absorbing, and her finely crafted prose is vivid and suspenseful, yet this novel runs like a car with a shimmy, and the problem is Henry. He narrates with just the sort of sarcasm a bright and sensitive teenager would employ, yet he's writing from an unspecified future date and, therefore, interjects his older self's more knowledgeable perspective in such a way as to blur rather than sharpen his persona. But perhaps this glitch only serves to highlight the truth implicit in this wise and funny tale: we must "come of age" many times over the course of a life, and it never gets any easier. --Donna Seaman
Guardian Review
Disobedience by Jane Hamilton 272pp Doubleday pounds 12.99 So here's the picture: you're a 17-year-old boy, buzzing with the usual cocktail of moodiness, curiosity and hormones. At music summer camp, after an evening of adagios, you find yourself going the whole way with a willing, luscious, fiddle-playing blonde. Even better, she's eager to stay in touch. You're all set up: first girlfriend, sex on demand, a real life opening up before you. So what do you now spend all your time thinking about? Your mother. Uh-oh. Henry Shaw is a boy with a problem: he has a mother fixation as big as the Ritz. He lives in the Chicago suburbs with his history- teacher father, pianist mother and oddball sister. Elvira is a devoted Civil War re-enactor - the kind of hardcore fanatic who, at the tender age of 13, dresses full-time as a (male) soldier and spends weekends wading through muddy fields clutching a genuine 1853 Enfield musket. Their father, a book-bound Civil War obsessive himself, encourages this passion, while their mother frets that "this tomboy phase is going to last the rest of her life". Henry, on the other hand, is considered to be a "wonderful boy, a model son". As the only computer- literate member of a technologically oblivious household, he helps his mother set up her internet account. Accidentally typing in her password instead of his own one day, he's shocked to discover emails from a lover. Appalled but at the same time unable to resist feeding his torment, he embarks upon a year of eavesdropping. The snooping is understandable enough, but Henry's response - feverish, obsessive, all-consuming - isn't. Into this preoccupation with his mother's furtive sex life he pours all the emotional energy that could and should be going into his own nascent one. Her adultery - only only ever viewed through Henry's confused adolescent eyes - is not, of course, what the book is about. Neither does it matter that her lover is never a very concrete presence, because Hamilton is interested only in Henry's reaction to him. The trouble is, his response is just too weird and worrying. You know it, I know it, even he (it's hinted) is beginning to know it. But it's just not clear whether the author knows it. There is nothing wrong with splattering a novel with all this Oedipal ooze if the author is willing to get in there, rummage around and explore it. But Hamilton seems bafflingly bent on passing her tale off as a mere insightful little vignette of teenage sensitivity and familial betrayal. Maybe this book has at its heart something tangled and manic, but it's obscured by her strange reluctance to touch, taste and inspect it. All the same, there is plenty to admire. The eccentric beginnings of Elvira's re-enactment saga build to a kooky and gloriously well- realised climax, though it barely impacts on Henry. The parents' fraught relationship with their difficult daughter rings touchingly true, and is told with vicious humour and sadness. Hamilton can and does relay the shabby emotional chaos of family life with real comic panache. But that's the subplot, and its significance in the novel is clearly secondary. Meanwhile, what's wrong with young Henry - and why? Does the adult Henry who narrates the novel still have mother trouble? By not even beginning to answer these questions, Hamilton lets us down, leaving us with a novel almost as fey and disappointing as her The Short History of a Prince , which was (for me anyway) infuriatingly unprepared to throw down its ballet pumps and Actually Say Something. It's especially galling, given that Hamilton's A Map of the World is still one of the most exhilaratingly uncompromising novels I've read (if you haven't yet, it's Anne Tyler with aggro, Roth with humanity). I'd love to know what's happened, why she's running so scared - why, when she has proven herself capable of real, muscular genius, she now insists on giving us nothing but these weedy, soppy boys. Caption: article-hamilton.1 Her adultery - only only ever viewed through [Henry Shaw]'s confused adolescent eyes - is not, of course, what the book is about. Neither does it matter that her lover is never a very concrete presence, because [Jane Hamilton] is interested only in Henry's reaction to him. The trouble is, his response is just too weird and worrying. You know it, I know it, even he (it's hinted) is beginning to know it. But it's just not clear whether the author knows it. There is nothing wrong with splattering a novel with all this Oedipal ooze if the author is willing to get in there, rummage around and explore it. But Hamilton seems bafflingly bent on passing her tale off as a mere insightful little vignette of teenage sensitivity and familial betrayal. Maybe this book has at its heart something tangled and manic, but it's obscured by her strange reluctance to touch, taste and inspect it. - Julie Myerson.
Kirkus Review
The mysteries at the core of an adolescent boys being are placed in a tender, precious light in Hamiltons latest triumph (The History of a Prince, 1998, etc.), which also poignantly portrays a mother torn between a lovers embrace and the family shes long called her own. What binds mother and son dramatically together is her e-mail, which her quiet, reasonable 17-year-old Henry has begun to read in secret, upstairs in their Chicago home. Its not an intentional act, at first, but when he learns that his mom, Beth, a passionate pianist, is having a deeply fulfilling affair with a fellow musician, he reduces himself to snooping almost daily. Henry cant quite fathom what he views as Beths betrayal, even though he does recognize her lovers way with words; but neither can he bring himself to tell anyone what he knowsnot his father, the socialist high-school teacher, not his 13-year-old sister Elvira, a Civil War enactor whom the term fervent doesnt begin to describe, not even his poet friend Karen. Instead, Henry has to deal in his quiet way with what he knows, putting distance and hostility between himself and Beth as a way of masking the pain. Meanwhile, the familys annual week at a music camp back east has opened Henrys own eyes to love and desire, as one night with a girl hes known practically since birth leaves him pining for more. He gets his wish when Lily comes to Chicago to look at colleges, but relations between him and his mother only deteriorate further as her liaison continues, until a shocking incident involving Elvira at the long-awaited Shiloh reenactment forces him to look at his mother in a new lightand forces her to reexamine her commitment to those she loves. A family drama wonderfully complete in every detail, but most astute and memorable in depicting the quirky brilliance peculiar to teenage thoughts and deeds.
Library Journal Review
Even without a virus, e-mail can be dangerous. When 17-year-old Henry accidentally reads a message to his pianist mother, he discovers that she is having an adulterous affair with a romantic violinmaker. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
Disobedience by Jane Hamilton 272pp Doubleday pounds 12.99 So here's the picture: you're a 17-year-old boy, buzzing with the usual cocktail of moodiness, curiosity and hormones. At music summer camp, after an evening of adagios, you find yourself going the whole way with a willing, luscious, fiddle-playing blonde. Even better, she's eager to stay in touch. You're all set up: first girlfriend, sex on demand, a real life opening up before you. So what do you now spend all your time thinking about? Your mother. Uh-oh. Henry Shaw is a boy with a problem: he has a mother fixation as big as the Ritz. He lives in the Chicago suburbs with his history- teacher father, pianist mother and oddball sister. Elvira is a devoted Civil War re-enactor - the kind of hardcore fanatic who, at the tender age of 13, dresses full-time as a (male) soldier and spends weekends wading through muddy fields clutching a genuine 1853 Enfield musket. Their father, a book-bound Civil War obsessive himself, encourages this passion, while their mother frets that "this tomboy phase is going to last the rest of her life". Henry, on the other hand, is considered to be a "wonderful boy, a model son". As the only computer- literate member of a technologically oblivious household, he helps his mother set up her internet account. Accidentally typing in her password instead of his own one day, he's shocked to discover emails from a lover. Appalled but at the same time unable to resist feeding his torment, he embarks upon a year of eavesdropping. The snooping is understandable enough, but Henry's response - feverish, obsessive, all-consuming - isn't. Into this preoccupation with his mother's furtive sex life he pours all the emotional energy that could and should be going into his own nascent one. Her adultery - only only ever viewed through Henry's confused adolescent eyes - is not, of course, what the book is about. Neither does it matter that her lover is never a very concrete presence, because Hamilton is interested only in Henry's reaction to him. The trouble is, his response is just too weird and worrying. You know it, I know it, even he (it's hinted) is beginning to know it. But it's just not clear whether the author knows it. There is nothing wrong with splattering a novel with all this Oedipal ooze if the author is willing to get in there, rummage around and explore it. But Hamilton seems bafflingly bent on passing her tale off as a mere insightful little vignette of teenage sensitivity and familial betrayal. Maybe this book has at its heart something tangled and manic, but it's obscured by her strange reluctance to touch, taste and inspect it. All the same, there is plenty to admire. The eccentric beginnings of Elvira's re-enactment saga build to a kooky and gloriously well- realised climax, though it barely impacts on Henry. The parents' fraught relationship with their difficult daughter rings touchingly true, and is told with vicious humour and sadness. Hamilton can and does relay the shabby emotional chaos of family life with real comic panache. But that's the subplot, and its significance in the novel is clearly secondary. Meanwhile, what's wrong with young Henry - and why? Does the adult Henry who narrates the novel still have mother trouble? By not even beginning to answer these questions, Hamilton lets us down, leaving us with a novel almost as fey and disappointing as her The Short History of a Prince , which was (for me anyway) infuriatingly unprepared to throw down its ballet pumps and Actually Say Something. It's especially galling, given that Hamilton's A Map of the World is still one of the most exhilaratingly uncompromising novels I've read (if you haven't yet, it's Anne Tyler with aggro, Roth with humanity). I'd love to know what's happened, why she's running so scared - why, when she has proven herself capable of real, muscular genius, she now insists on giving us nothing but these weedy, soppy boys. Caption: article-hamilton.1 Her adultery - only only ever viewed through [Henry Shaw]'s confused adolescent eyes - is not, of course, what the book is about. Neither does it matter that her lover is never a very concrete presence, because [Jane Hamilton] is interested only in Henry's reaction to him. The trouble is, his response is just too weird and worrying. You know it, I know it, even he (it's hinted) is beginning to know it. But it's just not clear whether the author knows it. There is nothing wrong with splattering a novel with all this Oedipal ooze if the author is willing to get in there, rummage around and explore it. But Hamilton seems bafflingly bent on passing her tale off as a mere insightful little vignette of teenage sensitivity and familial betrayal. Maybe this book has at its heart something tangled and manic, but it's obscured by her strange reluctance to touch, taste and inspect it. - Julie Myerson.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One Reading someone else's e-mail is a quiet, clean enterprise. There is no pitter-pattering around the room, no opening and closing the desk drawers, no percussive creasing as you draw the paper from the envelope and unfold it. There is no sound but the melody of the dial-up, the purity of the following Gregorian tones, and the sweet nihilistic measure of static. The brief elemental vibration that means contact. And then nothing. No smudge of ink, no greasy thumbprint left behind. In and out of the files, no trace. It could be the work of a ghost, this electronic eavesdropping. I was the boy in the family and therefore, statistically, the person most likely to seize upon the computer culture, the child to wire the household, tune it into our century, keep the two systems, one for me, the other for the rest of the Shaws, up and running. Elvira, my sister, was detail oriented and analytical and could have easily outdistanced me if only she'd had the desire. She had the intelli- gence, certainly, to learn complex languages, to program, to hack. But through most of the time I was living at home she was scornful of technology, stuck, as she was, in 1862 with her Civil War infantry regiment, the 11th Illinois. At a young age, much to my mother's sorrow, Elvira became a hardcore Civil War reenactor. It was I who begged and moped a little and pleaded for some kind of computer, a dud, a two- or three-year-old dinosaur--anything would do. I built myself a cardboard replica of the first Macintosh model, and for a good half hour at a stretch I lay on my bed typing on the paper keys, pretending to write programs that would win me fame and fortune. When I was nine, I appealed to my grandmother in a simple poor-boy letter: my grandmother, the one money bag we all in our particular ways went to, again and again, a source that seemed inexhaustible and at the ready. When the box arrived on our doorstep, I sat patiently with my parents showing them the fundamental maneuvers--dragging the mouse, clicking the mouse, see Mommy and Daddy double-click the mouse--as if the two of them were babies being prodded through an ordinary developmental stage. Several years later with my own money, I seriously upgraded. I had to lure my mother to her own e-mail account with the promise that she'd have satisfaction and even happiness. It was still early days for the kind of communication we now take for granted. Wizard that I was, I guaranteed her pleasure. I provided the password for her so she could commune with her musician friends, the hip ones, so she could have her circle of intimates right in front of her without having to go down to the end of the town. For her screen name I did away with her flat, no-crackle name, Beth, and from the full Elizabeth plucked the zippy Liza, attached her age to it, Liza38. I told her it sounded like the code name of a blond spy with a sizable bust, someone operating out of what used to be East Germany. When I was fourteen and fifteen, I liked to think that what was surely my sophisticated sense of humor had blossomed into its fullest dark and ironic potential. But big-busted-floozy spy jokes were not my mother's style. She was not herself well endowed, and from my point of view she was no seductress. She smiled at my attempt at wit: Nice try, Henry. Although she would but of course retain her dear perfection no matter what name she used, Richard Polloco, the lover, took to the pizzazz of her screen self and often called her Liza38. When I first stumbled into her e-mail file, I didn't mean to. It was accidental. It was about as easy to type in her password as mine. I wasn't even thinking. I had no plan, nothing premeditated, no scheme in place. I realized my error as the icons slowly formed before me in their beamy pleased way. It was through my fingers that I understood the misstep. "Welcome," our provider said. My hands froze above the keys. And again the voice. "You've got mail." You've got mail. What was the old girl up to? I suppose that thought went through my mind. I can't say for certain what the first message revealed, or even whom she had written. Because it was not only messages from Richard Polloco and messages meant for Richard Polloco that I read during that time, but others too, e-mails that my mother wrote to her friend Jane, hundreds, thousands of words, to explain, to justify, to excuse herself. What I do remember is the letter, a real United States Postal Service letter that I found in the box in the hall, the place we put outgoing mail. I noticed it because it was addressed to him, to Richard Polloco, in Tribbey, Wisconsin. My mother was in the kitchen making up a shopping list, and she must have set it there for just a minute. Richard Polloco. I already knew enough to think, I shouldn't pick this up, and I don't want to pick this up, and How can I keep from picking this up? I held it to the light, and I could see the scrap of paper inside. I could see the scrap, the size of a stamp, so small you couldn't write more than a single word on it. That's what I thought: What did she write that could be more than a single word? I held the envelope up in part because it was seemingly empty. At the angle, with the aid of the lamp, it was impossible not to see that single word on the slip of paper. You. That's all she had written. But that single word had weight. I knew enough by then to understand, to feel, if I'd wanted to, the ache in that short word. It is true that the subject of love, generally, is exhausted, but a person can still go on for a good long time about the specifics of a love scene, including the setting and then who said what and why, and how it made the listener feel. One of the first e-mails I read, and perhaps the very first one, was my mother's message to her friend Jane, back in Vermont. "This is an old story," she began. "There is nothing new in it." What she was doing, she said, was hardly noteworthy because it had been acted and reenacted countless times before. For me, during that year, the story had no elements that felt in any way worn. I don't believe that everything a person has seen and done is stored in the brain, there to retrieve if only you can pick the right lock. In fact, I blame the brain for making us as selective as we are, for editing out what we don't want to hear, for refusing to take hold of what could be the important detail. Still, if I have forgotten the first message, I have the sense of what it could have been. "This is an old story," my mother began. "There is nothing new in it." The seemingly shopworn tale my mother inhabited did not stop her from recounting, through the year, at great length, her feelings, her guilt, her despair, as well as the particulars--terrible in their vividness--of her journeys to see Richard Polloco in Wisconsin. Rpoll, he was, at luge.com. This is how our family was back then, not so long ago, less than a decade ago: Elvira Shaw, thirteen; myself, Henry Shaw, seventeen; Beth Gardener Shaw, thirty-eight; Kevin Shaw, forty-three. We had moved from a small town in Vermont to Chicago when I was fourteen. My parents seemed to feel that the upheaval, the trauma, of moving from one culture to another, from Mercury to Pluto, in effect, was worth it for all of our educations. I still ask myself regularly what it was, actually, that they were thinking. My father is a high school history teacher, a job that combines the skills of preaching, mudslinging, acting, and arm-twisting. You take his American history survey course and you can never again celebrate a holiday such as Columbus Day or Memorial Day or Presidents' Day with any sense of national pride. After my father has done his song and dance, you know more than you wanted to about the roughly 9 million Native Americans who died between 1642 and 1800. You are filled with disgust, dismay, and self-loathing because a complex civilization, a creative and by and large generous civilization, was wiped out. My father was offered a position at the Jesse Layton School in the tony Lincoln Park neighborhood in Chicago. At the time I didn't catch the detail that he'd been fired from his job in Vermont, probably because too many of his students felt disgust, dismay, and self-loathing after learning about their heritage. No problem, to move from the Northfield mountains, pure granite, from a town of 317, to a Midwestern city of 7 million built on a swamp. What, really, were they thinking? If we were going to go urban, my parents figured we might as well bypass the suburbs and do it up right. Without much discussion, as was her way, my grandmother purchased a brownstone for us on the upscale block of Roslyn Place near the Jesse Layton School. Minty, we called my grandmother, dollar signs blinking in our eyes. It was I, as a toddler, who parsed Grandmother Gardener down to the essential component. It goes without saying that we all wanted to be as close as we could to the aging matriarch, she who ruled with her iron hand from Lake Bluff, Illinois. As far as the Jesse Layton parents went, the school was basically a front for the Democratic Party, for rich bleeding-heart liberals. If Kevin Shaw couldn't live on a racially balanced street, at least he was given free reign to teach as he pleased, to turn out little socialists from his class to his heart's desire, with the understanding, of course, that the firebrands would someday settle down and become responsible Democrats. Although his salary was modest, he believed his position at Layton had many elements of the dream job. My mother, for her part, was interested in moving back home to the Midwest because of the cold and snow of the Vermont winters and the mud of the Vermont springs and the black flies of the Vermont summers. Not to mention all year round the warp we lived in, somewhere between the hardscrabble life of the real Vermonters and the artiste vacationers, giddy with their views and the mountain air and their leisure. My mother was ready to leave all of it, and it was a fine time, because the band she played in had gone through a difficult period and split up. She was free of them. Not least, I think she believed that if we stayed in Vermont, her tomboy daughter would one day take off into the hills with nothing on but a loincloth, nothing but her bare hands and sharp new canines to get herself some bloody grub. Many friends expressed sympathy for us both before and after the move. They had the idea that Elvira and I were being wrenched away from Eden, taking that long fall from the fragrant warm garden to the gritty gray world where, it is true, Elvira would have to wear clothes. Fully dressed and in a brownstone, we would be cramped. Outside we would be in danger from both the careless ways of the rich and the careless ways of the poor. Chicago would be beautiful in a man-made way, but the splendor would hardly be noticeable because of the exhaust and the grime and the noise and the litter. The natives jogged with their dogs and could not break their strides to clean up after them; it was no better, probably, than a medieval city, the chamber pots being emptied out of windows right into the street. And there would be people, people everywhere. That would be the worst of it, I thought, the feeling that you were always in some- one's company. But I got tired of what seemed like pity, and I did want to point out to the chorus that Wellington, Vermont, was hardly Shangri-La, that at the church suppers in Wellington you could get a hot dish with beets called red flannel hash. Furthermore, the librarian, Mrs. Hegley, based on her extensive knowledge of her neighbor's moral behavior, either excused her patrons their fines or did not. My father had been a selectman, and I had heard enough of his conversations about the difficulty in getting monies for the school, for the library, for much of anything beyond snow removal within a week of a storm. Both my parents, I knew, worried about my education and my sensibility in a community where I was the only boy in school during deer-hunting season. All this is not to say that Wellington wasn't a good place and that I don't still miss it. I was taken from Vermont before I could think to want to leave it myself, and so for me Wellington is the ideal, my old backyard there my deepest sense of home. Right away after the move I longed for it, in spite of the fact that I'd been in a conspicuous position, the kid of a proselytizing socialist schoolteacher and a city-slicker piano-playing mother. To make matters worse, we had no television, not that, as my mother used to say, I didn't absorb most everything I needed to understand about our culture by respir- ing. Inhale, I got The Simpsons, exhale Beavis and Butt-head; inhale Letterman, exhale MTV, every single song, every single leer. When we finally did get a television, when we moved to Chicago, I watched it that first summer, up in my parents' room, without moving from the bed. Excerpted from Disobedience by Jane Hamilton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Chapter One Reading someone else's e-mail is a quiet, clean enterprise. There is no pitter-pattering around the room, no opening and closing the desk drawers, no percussive creasing as you draw the paper from the envelope and unfold it. There is no sound but the melody of the dial-up, the purity of the following Gregorian tones, and the sweet nihilistic measure of static. The brief elemental vibration that means contact. And then nothing. No smudge of ink, no greasy thumbprint left behind. In and out of the files, no trace. It could be the work of a ghost, this electronic eavesdropping. I was the boy in the family and therefore, statistically, the person most likely to seize upon the computer culture, the child to wire the household, tune it into our century, keep the two systems, one for me, the other for the rest of the Shaws, up and running. Elvira, my sister, was detail oriented and analytical and could have easily outdistanced me if only she'd had the desire. She had the intelli- gence, certainly, to learn complex languages, to program, to hack. But through most of the time I was living at home she was scornful of technology, stuck, as she was, in 1862 with her Civil War infantry regiment, the 11th Illinois. At a young age, much to my mother's sorrow, Elvira became a hardcore Civil War reenactor. It was I who begged and moped a little and pleaded for some kind of computer, a dud, a two- or three-year-old dinosaur--anything would do. I built myself a cardboard replica of the first Macintosh model, and for a good half hour at a stretch I lay on my bed typing on the paper keys, pretending to write programs that would win me fame and fortune. When I was nine, I appealed to my grandmother in a simple poor-boy letter: my grandmother, the one money bag we all in our particular ways went to, again and again, a source that seemed inexhaustible and at the ready. When the box arrived on our doorstep, I sat patiently with my parents showing them the fundamental maneuvers--dragging the mouse, clicking the mouse, see Mommy and Daddy double-click the mouse--as if the two of them were babies being prodded through an ordinary developmental stage. Several years later with my own money, I seriously upgraded. I had to lure my mother to her own e-mail account with the promise that she'd have satisfaction and even happiness. It was still early days for the kind of communication we now take for granted. Wizard that I was, I guaranteed her pleasure. I provided the password for her so she could commune with her musician friends, the hip ones, so she could have her circle of intimates right in front of her without having to go down to the end of the town. For her screen name I did away with her flat, no-crackle name, Beth, and from the full Elizabeth plucked the zippy Liza, attached her age to it, Liza38. I told her it sounded like the code name of a blond spy with a sizable bust, someone operating out of what used to be East Germany. When I was fourteen and fifteen, I liked to think that what was surely my sophisticated sense of humor had blossomed into its fullest dark and ironic potential. But big-busted-floozy spy jokes were not my mother's style. She was not herself well endowed, and from my point of view she was no seductress. She smiled at my attempt at wit: Nice try, Henry. Although she would but of course retain her dear perfection no matter what name she used, Richard Polloco, the lover, took to the pizzazz of her screen self and often called her Liza38. When I first stumbled into her e-mail file, I didn't mean to. It was accidental. It was about as easy to type in her password as mine. I wasn't even thinking. I had no plan, nothing premeditated, no scheme in place. I realized my error as the icons slowly formed before me in their beamy pleased way. It was through my fingers that I understood the misstep. "Welcome," our provider said. My hands froze above the keys. And again the voice. "You've got mail." You've got mail. What was the old girl up to? I suppose that thought went through my mind. I can't say for certain what the first message revealed, or even whom she had written. Because it was not only messages from Richard Polloco and messages meant for Richard Polloco that I read during that time, but others too, e-mails that my mother wrote to her friend Jane, hundreds, thousands of words, to explain, to justify, to excuse herself. What I do remember is the letter, a real United States Postal Service letter that I found in the box in the hall, the place we put outgoing mail. I noticed it because it was addressed to him, to Richard Polloco, in Tribbey, Wisconsin. My mother was in the kitchen making up a shopping list, and she must have set it there for just a minute. Richard Polloco. I already knew enough to think, I shouldn't pick this up, and I don't want to pick this up, and How can I keep from picking this up? I held it to the light, and I could see the scrap of paper inside. I could see the scrap, the size of a stamp, so small you couldn't write more than a single word on it. That's what I thought: What did she write that could be more than a single word? I held the envelope up in part because it was seemingly empty. At the angle, with the aid of the lamp, it was impossible not to see that single word on the slip of paper. You. That's all she had written. But that single word had weight. I knew enough by then to understand, to feel, if I'd wanted to, the ache in that short word. It is true that the subject of love, generally, is exhausted, but a person can still go on for a good long time about the specifics of a love scene, including the setting and then who said what and why, and how it made the listener feel. One of the first e-mails I read, and perhaps the very first one, was my mother's message to her friend Jane, back in Vermont. "This is an old story," she began. "There is nothing new in it." What she was doing, she said, was hardly noteworthy because it had been acted and reenacted countless times before. For me, during that year, the story had no elements that felt in any way worn. I don't believe that everything a person has seen and done is stored in the brain, there to retrieve if only you can pick the right lock. In fact, I blame the brain for making us as selective as we are, for editing out what we don't want to hear, for refusing to take hold of what could be the important detail. Still, if I have forgotten the first message, I have the sense of what it could have been. "This is an old story," my mother began. "There is nothing new in it." The seemingly shopworn tale my mother inhabited did not stop her from recounting, through the year, at great length, her feelings, her guilt, her despair, as well as the particulars--terrible in their vividness--of her journeys to see Richard Polloco in Wisconsin. Rpoll, he was, at luge.com. This is how our family was back then, not so long ago, less than a decade ago: Elvira Shaw, thirteen; myself, Henry Shaw, seventeen; Beth Gardener Shaw, thirty-eight; Kevin Shaw, forty-three. We had moved from a small town in Vermont to Chicago when I was fourteen. My parents seemed to feel that the upheaval, the trauma, of moving from one culture to another, from Mercury to Pluto, in effect, was worth it for all of our educations. I still ask myself regularly what it was, actually, that they were thinking. My father is a high school history teacher, a job that combines the skills of preaching, mudslinging, acting, and arm-twisting. You take his American history survey course and you can never again celebrate a holiday such as Columbus Day or Memorial Day or Presidents' Day with any sense of national pride. After my father has done his song and dance, you know more than you wanted to about the roughly 9 million Native Americans who died between 1642 and 1800. You are filled with disgust, dismay, and self-loathing because a complex civilization, a creative and by and large generous civilization, was wiped out. My father was offered a position at the Jesse Layton School in the tony Lincoln Park neighborhood in Chicago. At the time I didn't catch the detail that he'd been fired from his job in Vermont, probably because too many of his students felt disgust, dismay, and self-loathing after learning about their heritage. No problem, to move from the Northfield mountains, pure granite, from a town of 317, to a Midwestern city of 7 million built on a swamp. What, really, were they thinking? If we were going to go urban, my parents figured we might as well bypass the suburbs and do it up right. Without much discussion, as was her way, my grandmother purchased a brownstone for us on the upscale block of Roslyn Place near the Jesse Layton School. Minty, we called my grandmother, dollar signs blinking in our eyes. It was I, as a toddler, who parsed Grandmother Gardener down to the essential component. It goes without saying that we all wanted to be as close as we could to the aging matriarch, she who ruled with her iron hand from Lake Bluff, Illinois. As far as the Jesse Layton parents went, the school was basically a front for the Democratic Party, for rich bleeding-heart liberals. If Kevin Shaw couldn't live on a racially balanced street, at least he was given free reign to teach as he pleased, to turn out little socialists from his class to his heart's desire, with the understanding, of course, that the firebrands would someday settle down and become responsible Democrats. Although his salary was modest, he believed his position at Layton had many elements of the dream job. My mother, for her part, was interested in moving back home to the Midwest because of the cold and snow of the Vermont winters and the mud of the Vermont springs and the black flies of the Vermont summers. Not to mention all year round the warp we lived in, somewhere between the hardscrabble life of the real Vermonters and the artiste vacationers, giddy with their views and the mountain air and their leisure. My mother was ready to leave all of it, and it was a fine time, because the band she played in had gone through a difficult period and split up. She was free of them. Not least, I think she believed that if we stayed in Vermont, her tomboy daughter would one day take off into the hills with nothing on but a loincloth, nothing but her bare hands and sharp new canines to get herself some bloody grub. Many friends expressed sympathy for us both before and after the move. They had the idea that Elvira and I were being wrenched away from Eden, taking that long fall from the fragrant warm garden to the gritty gray world where, it is true, Elvira would have to wear clothes. Fully dressed and in a brownstone, we would be cramped. Outside we would be in danger from both the careless ways of the rich and the careless ways of the poor. Chicago would be beautiful in a man-made way, but the splendor would hardly be noticeable because of the exhaust and the grime and the noise and the litter. The natives jogged with their dogs and could not break their strides to clean up after them; it was no better, probably, than a medieval city, the chamber pots being emptied out of windows right into the street. And there would be people, people everywhere. That would be the worst of it, I thought, the feeling that you were always in some- one's company. But I got tired of what seemed like pity, and I did want to point out to the chorus that Wellington, Vermont, was hardly Shangri-La, that at the church suppers in Wellington you could get a hot dish with beets called red flannel hash. Furthermore, the librarian, Mrs. Hegley, based on her extensive knowledge of her neighbor's moral behavior, either excused her patrons their fines or did not. My father had been a selectman, and I had heard enough of his conversations about the difficulty in getting monies for the school, for the library, for much of anything beyond snow removal within a week of a storm. Both my parents, I knew, worried about my education and my sensibility in a community where I was the only boy in school during deer-hunting season. All this is not to say that Wellington wasn't a good place and that I don't still miss it. I was taken from Vermont before I could think to want to leave it myself, and so for me Wellington is the ideal, my old backyard there my deepest sense of home. Right away after the move I longed for it, in spite of the fact that I'd been in a conspicuous position, the kid of a proselytizing socialist schoolteacher and a city-slicker piano-playing mother. To make matters worse, we had no television, not that, as my mother used to say, I didn't absorb most everything I needed to understand about our culture by respir- ing. Inhale, I got The Simpsons, exhale Beavis and Butt-head; inhale Letterman, exhale MTV, every single song, every single leer. When we finally did get a television, when we moved to Chicago, I watched it that first summer, up in my parents' room, without moving from the bed. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from Disobedience by Jane Hamilton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.