Traverse City Record-Eagle

Books

July 19, 2008

On Books: Patchett takes a 'Run'

BY ELIZABETH KANE BUZZELLi

Of what is a family made? Is it genes and blood and familial memories stretching back into the far reaches of time? Is it a similar nose? A chin in common? Is it a talent shared due to good snagging in the family gene pool?

Or is it something very different than any of these? Perhaps the word itself is wrong: "family," meant to mean one thing but denoting something other than what we think.

This is the question at the heart of Ann Patchett's novel, "Run" (paperback, HarperCollins), a novel built on close character studies of the Doyle family of Boston. The father, Bernard Doyle, is an ex-mayor, well thought of, and as such he is accorded extraordinary privilege, even though his family is not your average East Coast, Irish-Catholic family.

The novel begins with a statue of the Blessed Mother. The novel begins with deception. And it also begins with death.

Bernard's wife, Bernadette, has died, leaving behind three boys. One, Sullivan, is her and Bernard's own child. Tip and Teddy are adopted and they are black. These are two, now college-age, brothers with varied talents. One will become a scientist. The other seems headed for the priesthood. The eldest son, Sullivan, has gone to Africa to help the poor and afflicted; or he's gone to Africa to skim money by diluting AIDS drugs. Sullivan is not a villain in this story, but rather an outsider who sees things as they are rather than as others perceive them.

The religious statue (a part of a long-ago lie) has come to represent the dead Bernadette to all of her sons, who mourn to varying conscious and unconscious degrees. But it is the night that a woman steps from the shadows to save Tip from being run over by a car that all of the carefully tied knots of this family, all the connections -- one to the other -- begin to unravel.

Deceptions are unearthed -- first that the woman who saved the young man is his biological mother. She now has another child, a daughter. Another deception is the parentage of the girl. Nothing is what it seems to be. The boy's lives all change -- especially the lives of the adopted boys, and then the life of the young black girl they think is their sister.

Oddly, mothers and fathers seem to appear and disappear in this novel. Biological dads have drifted off; a priest with healing powers disconnects. Only one, Bernard Doyle, remains steadfast, though his loyalties are tested again and again. Each of these characters seems to morph into something other than who and what they were at the beginning. Young, intelligent and gifted men hurt themselves -- one by careless injury during a snowstorm; another by almost killing the man (a father of sorts) he cares for most.

One of the most intriguing characters is the old priest, brother-in-law to Bernard Doyle. Father Sullivan is at the end of his life, suffering with a bad heart and housed in a facility for dying priests. Somehow his touch has healed two women and his fame as a healer has spread. Yet, it is his touch that brings death. Used as the interpreter of the very deepest level of meaning, the old priest comes to doubt his powers and his faith. He reconsiders what God and heaven mean, coming to be sorry for what he considers errors he has followed and taught throughout his priesthood.

Now that his heart had become so shiftless and unreliable, now that he could be scenting the afterlife, he had started to wonder if, in fact, there was no afterlife at all. Look at all those true believers who wanted only to live, look at himself, clinging onto this life like a squirrel scrambling up the icy pitch of a roof. In suggesting that there may be nothing ahead of them, he in no way meant to diminish the future; instead, Father Sullivan hoped to elevate the present to a state of the divine. It seemed from this moment of repose that God may well have been life itself. God may have been the baseball games, the beautiful cigarette he smoked alone ... how wrongheaded it seemed now to think that the thrill of heartbeat and breath were just a stepping stone to something greater. Life itself had been holy.

Patchett's use of multiple mixed viewpoints works here as she moves from the 11-year-old's point of view to one of the young men to the old, dying priest. It is the test of a talented and clever writer to pull off such a trick. Here the melding of thoughts and perceptions are seamless.

What emerges from this novel of a family deceiving themselves over pseudo similar traits and talents is that the word "family" is a semantic misnomer for a grouping of like genes, which might be called just that -- a clan; a biological construct. "Family" seems more a word reserved for people who choose to be together, who choose to love each other despite racial, class and gender divides; who cling to one another not for any sameness but for their shared humanity. This seems to be another level of the book -- differences are of little importance compared to the reality of who people are.

Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli can be reached at ebuzzelli@aol.com

Author schedules local appearances

Ann Patchett will be in northern Michigan, speaking and signing her books. On July 31, she will be at Saturn Books in Gaylord at 6 p.m., returning Aug 1 at 4 p.m. On Aug. 2, from 4-6 p.m., she will be at the conference room off the library on the campus of North Central Michigan College in Petoskey, sponsored by McLean and Eakin Book Store.

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