Children of the 70s (I’m one) have been called one of “the least parented, least nurtured generations in U.S. history.” Parents were focused on finding themselves, self-actualization, and other pursuits in which children were not included. Meanwhile, kids had a lot more freedom than they do today, a loss I often lament. But the excessive freedom has been a mixed blessing for the children in Laura Lippman and Jessica Anya Blau‘s latest novels: The Most Dangerous Thing (William Morrow, 2011) and Drinking Closer to Home (HarperPerennial, 2011). Bad things can happen to children alone in the woods, literally or figuratively. Sometimes they get over it. Sometimes they don’t.
In Jessica Anya Blau’s Drinking Closer to Home, the mother of the family quits her household duties to paint: “The year Anna was eleven, Portia was eight, and Emery was three, Louise decided she quit being a housewife.” Anna takes over the kitchen; Portia takes care of their younger brother; and the house itself dissolves in the kind of slovenly mess that means the sheets have to be thrown out once a year when they all clean before their grandparents come for a visit.
In The Most Dangerous Thing, five neighborhood kids hang out together one summer, walking farther and farther into the woods near their houses in Dickeyville. “The primary rule, in those day before cell phones, was that we had to stay within shouting distance of Gwen’s house. But what was shouting distance?” They test the distance by walking a ways away from the loudest and youngest member of their group, the troubled and troublesome Go-go (Gordon). He shouts, and when they hear him, they consider that shouting distance. Their fathers are at work, looking for work, or not in the picture, and their mothers are absorbed by painting, overwhelmed with housework, or at work themselves.
Both books toggle back and forth between the 1970s and today. In contemporary life, Louise, the wife and mother in Drinking Closer to Home, has had a heart attack, and her husband and adult children have gathered around her to keep a vigil. Together they struggle through their various issues: Portia’s husband leaving her, Anna’s addictive appetites, and most of all, Emery and his boyfriend Alejandro’s desire to have a baby using Portia or Anna’s eggs. Their unconventional upbringing and wacky family background, including their near-abusive paternal grandparents, make an entertaining and slightly horrifying story to today’s overinvolved parents (I’m one of those, too), but most of Anna, Portia, and Emery’s problems stem from their own personalities and situations. Their colorful early life doesn’t appear to have been any more damaging than a more traditional childhood in the long run. They wished their parents were more present when they were young, and then they got over the neglect as adults: “It has been only recently that Anna forgave her mother for a litany of crimes Anna had been carrying in her stomach like a knotted squid.” There were compensations, such as Portia and Emery’s closeness and Anna’s freedom, and they made the most of those.
In The Most Dangerous Thing, Go-go, a lifetime alcoholic and ne’er-do-well, has died in a car crash, and Gwen’s father has fallen and broken his hip, so Gwen is back in Dickeyville to care for him, bringing all five children, now adults, together for the funeral.
Gwen, Sean, and Tim want to work out what happened to Go-go. Was it a crash or a suicide? Hadn’t he been sober for two years? What happened in the woods, all those years ago, when their explorations brought them into contact with a crazy homeless person who lived in a shack there? What happened the night of the 1980 hurricane, when Chicken George, as they called the stranger, chased Go-go and Mickey? Doris Halloran, the boys’ long-suffering mother, has kept Go-go’s secrets for many years, and isn’t about to let them out now, but even she would like to know why Go-go started wetting the bed again at age 10.
There’s a lot hanging on one summer of friendship in The Most Dangerous Thing. It’s hard to believe that one summer of camaraderie, then dissolution of the group when two of its members pair off, plus sexual molestation and and an uncertain death, would wreak so much havoc in their adult lives. In Lippman’s I’d Know You Anywhere, the protagonist is kidnapped for months and suffers far worse as a teenager, but Eliza’s adult life is happy and sunny, with a strong marriage and satisfactory child-rearing of the next generation, in addition to a few lingering fears that do not dominate her world. The difference might be in how the parents handled the negative incident. Eliza’s parents moved away from the scene of the crime and encouraged their daughter to discuss her kidnapping as much or as little as she wished. In The Most Dangerous Thing, the Hallorans, Robisons, and Mickey’s family sweep it under the rug. The fathers promise never to talk about how Chicken George died, even to their wives. So when the remaining four members of the five points of the star, as they thought of themselves that summer, are together again more than thirty years later, there’s still a lot to figure out.
Lippman proclaimed at her talk at the Baltimore Book Festival that she had a “glorious” childhood, exculpating her parents, who were apparently worried she writes as she does due to incidents they were unaware of. Blau, on the other hand, has said that her tales of borderline neglectful parents and home fun for kids draw largely from her own childhood. Who knows whether or not largely unsupervised childhoods are damaging in the long run? The Most Dangerous Thing and Drinking Closer to Home provide limited but entertaining evidence that it can go either way.
