THE BLUE WINDOW

These people are related—but can they relate?

Berne, who won the Orange Prize for A Crime in the Neighborhood, her 1997 debut, and more recently charmed readers with the social satire The Dogs of Littlefield (2016), chooses a tight focus for her latest: the tense dynamics of three troubled individuals as they play out over a few days in rural Vermont. Marika is a Dutch survivor of the Nazi occupation; she lives alone in a run-down cottage by a lake, where the action occurs. Marika has been only barely in touch with her daughter, Lorna, whom she abandoned along with her husband and son when the children were young, resurfacing more than 30 years later, after the birth of Lorna's son. Lorna is a therapist whose husband has recently left her for another woman and moved to the West Coast; she is dealing with the return from college of her 19-year-old, Adam, after a traumatic experience he will not share—nor has she ever told him about her mother's abandonment. Following his mysterious humiliation, Adam has embarked on what he thinks of as a "scourge" that involves, among other things, rejecting the first-person pronoun and proper names. He is A, his parents are X and Y, and this makes the first chapter, written from his perspective, a tough read. "A did away with I. I=Death." When Lorna learns that Marika has sprained her ankle and needs family assistance, she asks Adam to accompany her on the road trip. He agrees only as part of his self-abnegation project but then finds he has a more positive response to his gruff, unappealing grandmother than to what he sees as his pathetic, approval-seeking mom. Lorna, though miserable, is smart enough to see what's going on. "People who suffered a trauma often felt that if it went unmentioned it was containable, which led to intimacy issues." So Marika's not talking about her very dark war experience, Lorna's not talking about her childhood, and Adam sure as hell isn't telling what happened at college. Until they all do.

A bleak but psychologically insightful portrait of family dynamics.