FICTION
“Hold Still”
Lynn Steger Strong
Liveright
$26.95, 272 pages
In an ambitious novel that tackles concepts of accountability, identity, feminism, parenting and generational damage, first-time author Lynn Steger Strong explores the mother-daughter bond through an intricately interwoven story of a tragic accident and its aftermath.
The plot is simple enough: An unstable young woman makes a terrible mistake, and everyone touched by it suffers the consequences. But in the telling, “Hold Still” reveals a fascination with the addictions and perils of academia and the reading life, and warns that women still need that Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf argued for in 1929.
Maya Taylor and her husband, Stephen, well-regarded Columbia professors ensconced in pricey Park Slope, almost had it all. Maya, a Woolf scholar rarely without her well-worn copy of “To the Lighthouse,” teaches English. Stephen, distinguished head of the philosophy department, is on a first-name basis with the great thinkers, Martin (Heidegger) and Friedrich (Nietzsche).
Unfortunately, their promising offspring, Ellie, 23, and Ben, 19, have fallen rather far from the tree. Ben is floundering, poised to drop out of college. Ellie, who has been zonked on drugs and sex since adolescence, is currently institutionalized following an incident that has rocked the family to its affluent core.
The story unfolds through two alternating perspectives: Maya’s, set in the present and working back through the aftermath of the accident; and Ellie’s, whose begins two years earlier, partly filling in the blanks of her troubled history.
As the novel opens, Maya and Stephen have regretfully locked Ellie in rehab as protection against the legal repercussions of her fatal misstep. We are not told what it was, only that it has left the family reeling, Maya in particular. Withdrawn, unable to eat, she runs for 10 to 15 miles each day, wondering if she’s responsible for Ellie’s downfall.
Flashbacks explain her reasoning: Maya’s habit of retreating when her children needed her most, the result of a mother who deserted her as an infant and a father whose suffocating, inappropriate demands for sympathy left her at risk for inflicting the same damage.
Stephen wonders if the fault lies elsewhere: They’ve given the kids too good a life, he says, made things too easy, not just for Ellie, but also Ben, whose bright prospects have dimmed in the shadow of Ellie’s delinquency. Stephen thinks Ben needs his ass kicked; to Maya, he’s the kid “for whom there has never been space enough to be a problem too.”
Grieving the loss of her daughter but unable to forgive her transgression, Maya seeks consolation through relationships with her young teaching assistant, Charles; her “oldest, closest friend” and coworker, Laura; and the female students to whom she has always gravitated as mother and rescuer in ways we learn Ellie has deeply resented.
In Ellie’s account, we see her downplaying her dalliance with sex, pills, and heroin — she once “disappeared” for a few days, sported “a single track mark,” is “not totally sure about what [she’s] meant to recover from.”
Still, she practices an admirable, if shaky, restraint within the rules set up to protect her. Though she longs for the kind of thrilling connection her mother cultivates with her students, she gets over-mothering instead: "Her mom parented so much sometimes that Ellie couldn't breathe."
Nevertheless, when Maya decides, after a minor infraction, that Ellie could benefit from a stint in Florida as a nanny for the young son of one of her former students, she repeats her pattern of neglect in the face of her daughter’s obvious need: Ellie is “not sure she’ll survive if they really make her go.”
This is perhaps the most troubling aspect of Maya's emotional blindness — her green-lighting of Ellie as babysitter. Knowing her daughter's bleak history, readers will find themselves murmuring, What could possibly go wrong? Only Ben acknowledges this ugly truth, reminding his mother, "It's all our faults."
From here on, it’s a toss-up as to who to blame for the inevitable outcome. Strong probes everyone for his or her culpability, including Stephen, who, ignoring his daughter’s cries for help, blathers on about Nietzsche; and even Annie, the young mother whose world Ellie shatters.
The Taylors’ one-size-fits-all path of college and academic excellence comes under fire as well. We learn that Ellie’s estrangement from her own inner resources — even her refusal to read — may be a rebellion against her mother’s desire to “make something of Ellie’s choices, to shape her, form her.”
Last but not least, Strong faults the strain of full-time motherhood, conveyed in the desperate flights Maya once took to escape her young children; a fellow teacher’s unapologetic childlessness; a young novelist’s decision to abandon her husband and new baby in order to have time to write.
Strong, born and raised in South Florida, floods readers with warm ocean waves and chilly glimpses of the Hudson River, as well as the specter of Woolf’s watery suicide. The author’s real-life scholarship (Strong teaches creative writing at Columbia) appears in the many parallels to Woolf’s life and work, with an emphasis on characters from “Mrs. Dalloway.”
For all the deft plotting and suspense that drive “Hold Still” to its conclusion, the novel suffers a bit from pacing toward the end, when dueling cliffhangers tend to detract from the narrative flow. It’s a minor flaw in this assured, illuminating examination of the complex ties between mothers and daughters, the ways we can go on living in the face of unimaginable sorrow, and how the stories that have come before us can help.
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