"The Lost Son" ($28.95 hardcover, Regal House) is the first novel by Stephanie Vanderslice, director of the Arkansas Writers MFA Workshop at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.
At least that is what the press information says; I'm more inclined to believe it is just the first novel that Vanderslice has published, and that she likely other has manuscripts stashed away in drawers or on hard drives, in various stages of incompletion. I hazard this guess because "The Lost Son" feels nothing like a first novel; it's confident and settled, like a mid-career work of an established author.
Most first novels, good and bad, feel like wishful memoirs or pastiche, more interested in presenting as remarkable than serving the reader. Most writers — young and old, successful and floundering — are at least partially driven by ego. A sentiment I often hear expressed is that no one really likes to write, they only like to have written. While I disagree with that — some people take joy in writing what they have no expectation of publishing, and pseudonymous examples abound — most writers really want to be seen.
And that impulse often interferes with the direct connection to the reader necessary for successful storytelling. Whenever something in a novel causes the reader to wonder about the author's background or personal history, there's a risk the reader might be jolted out of the fictional universe. The perils of metafiction may not be insurmountable, but they are very real. And experience teaches that first novels are more prone to succumbing to these problems than further efforts, possibly because one's first novel might also be one's last.
If this sounds like I'm faint praising "The Lost Son" for not being a disaster, that's not what I mean. It's just that it's so unusual to find a first novel that can count its structure among its chief values that I want to write about that before getting into the other virtues.
"The Lost Son" is a book that has been put together by someone who knows how to put together a book, an author who so neatly disappears from her created universe that her characters might debate her existence. It feels well-researched and credible, both in its descriptions of human emotional weather and great historical events.
And it's delivered in a spare but powerful prose style in which every word seems weighed and sorted and considered for cadence and tone and variety. It reads easily, so you might think it was easily accomplished. It wasn't. Or at least I hope it wasn't.
As the title suggests, it's a story about a mother looking to find her son.
Julia never knew her own mother, who died giving birth to her. Her father, a chef of some renown, left his job at a luxury hotel to join the wealthy Kruse household in Stuttgart, Germany, in order that he might have time to spend with his two young daughters. The Kruses accept them as family, and Julia — a bright, voracious reader — and her sister, Lena, are privately tutored alongside the Kruse children.
Julia's academic prowess causes tension between her and Lena and wins her the affection of Robert, the scion to the Kruse fortune. After Julia's father dies, Robert prevails upon his family to allow Julia to move into the family home until she turns 18, at which time he proposes to marry her.
While the Kruses are not thrilled about the arrangement, they arrange for the young couple to emigrate to New York in 1922. The Kruses have made their money as jewelers; once in America Robert will apprentice himself to a Park Avenue jeweler to learn the family trade, with the ultimate goal of opening a branch of the family business there.
After five years in New York, Julia and Robert seem to be navigating life smoothly; they have a healthy, happy son named Johannes. But Julia's second pregnancy is difficult, and after giving birth to Nicholas she's confined to a wheelchair and attended by a young nurse named Helene.
As Julia regains her strength, the unforgivable happens — Robert and Helene kidnap Nicholas and run back to Germany, leaving Julia to raise Johannes alone, in desperate circumstances.
Stonewalled by the Kruses and her sister, Julia lacks the means to genuinely search for her son. She works at a bakery, she raises Johannes.
And in 1945, with Johannes grown up and in the army fighting Germans, she meets Paul, an Irish immigrant working as a chauffeur for a powerful, politically connected man.
Maybe there is a certain inevitability to the plot that makes it feel a little like one of Irwin Shaw's novels before he became obsessed with the inevitability of death — it has some of the epic scope of "Rich Man, Poor Man," and one might imagine an enterprising producer recognizing its potential as the intellectual property base for some miniseries.
But it's not one of those novels that exists to demonstrate some cinematic proof of concept — there's a strength and poise to Vanderslice's clean prose that suggests careful attention to refinement and fitting and the patient application of an intelligent and mature technique.
Not a first rodeo, I'm guessing.
Email: pmartin@adgnewsroom.com