HIS MOTHER’S SON

A legacy of guilt and secrecy unhinges a hardworking woman doctor’s marriage and psyche, in this accomplished debut by Oregon playwright and filmmaker Emmons.

A prologue introduces young Californian “Cady” (Cadence) Miller and her younger brother Varney, who even at four years old is a seething bundle of potentially violent energies. The narrative then leaps ahead to the novel’s present, in which Cady, having changed her name and (she believes) escaped her past, is now emergency room physician Jana Miller, living in Oregon, happily married to freelance carpenter Cooper Johansen, and the mother of volatile six-year-old Evan. When Evan’s accumulating misbehavior suggests a latent sociopathic streak, Jana’s fragmented memories of her youth cohere, and we gradually learn that Varney, from whom she has long been estranged, had committed a horrific crime, been sentenced to life in prison, and is now dying of AIDS. The tensions thus built up in Jana also estrange her from Cooper (who has never been told that Varney exists, or of his wife’s other life) and Evan. In a desperate, reluctant pilgrimage to Varney’s bedside (in a prison hospice ward), Jana finds both a retreat from her own duplicity and cowardice, and a courageous grasp at the possibility of healing. As the publisher acknowledges, this is Sue Miller and Jane Hamilton territory. Emmons enters it with considerable flair, dramatizing Jana’s yearning for security in her devotion to the precision of medical science, while also rendering with acute specificity the tactics Jana employs to live with her own failings and rescue Evan from what she fears is his inevitable future. Emmons also sustains a mood of impending menace with great skill, finding numerous superbly suggestive metaphors (as Jana retreats during an argument with Cooper, “His voice pummels her back”; a dying patient’s “breath crackles with the . . . unpredictability of a package being unwrapped”).

Gorgeous writing throughout makes for an unusually affecting and memorable debut.