If you’re facing a painful trip home this month, resist stocking up on wine and Candy Cane Joe-Joe’s. Instead, tuck a copy of Kate Christensen’s tempestuous new novel in your suitcase. There’s a good chance your own travails will pale next to those faced in “Welcome Home, Stranger.” And if not, at least Christensen will serve as a wise captain to guide you through the family storm.
Of course, novels about going home are as common as flight delays. And a certain degree of rigor mortis has crept into the plot of relatives gathering in the wake of a death. But Christensen’s narrator charges into that worn storyline with refreshing candor.
“My mother died two days ago. Or was it three,” Rachel says at the opening of “Welcome Home, Stranger.” “My sense of time has been wonky ever since I got back from the Arctic.”
Studying climate change at the top of the world might seem like a good excuse for not calling much or visiting more often, but when Rachel’s sister, Celeste, picks her up at the airport in Portland, Maine, the weather inside the Mercedes SUV is already freezing with a chance of avalanches. “She doesn’t have to say a word,” Rachel thinks. “My antennae are as hyperattuned to my sister’s frequency as hers are to mine.” Celeste cared for their late mother by herself through a long, horrible illness. “She’s upset that I didn’t come home sooner,” Rachel thinks. Indeed. Rachel’s been AWOL for the last 10 years. The sisters ride home in a thick amalgamation of sibling love and resentment.
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Welcome home, reader, to a deeply endearing story about confronting one’s past and constructing a new future — under extreme duress. Rachel may be a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer, but she’s got no ego about her status. “I look and feel exactly like what I am,” she says with her typical fondness for taxidermic efficiency: “a middle-aged childless recently orphaned menopausal workaholic journalist.” And that’s the sugarcoated version; she’s also a divorced woman living with her ex-husband and his boyfriend. Her life is a kitchen drawer of sharp objects and sticky problems that she doesn’t want to deal with. “Coming back to Maine is complicated,” she admits.
If Christensen didn’t have such a clever sense of humor, the situation she throws her narrator into — returning to help spread Mom’s ashes — could feel intolerably dreary. But everything about this initial homecoming has been designed to prick Rachel with comic humiliation. In stark contrast to Rachel’s discombobulated home life, Celeste lives in a Portland mansion with her trust fund husband and their shiny twins “with SAT tutors and language coaches, SSRIs and antidepressants and Ritalin, special meals tailored to their many allergies and intolerances.”
Well, at least Rachel isn’t bitter.
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The first night back, Celeste invites Rachel’s old boyfriend over for dinner. With his lovely new wife. And he immediately turns the knife: “It’s still you, Rachel,” he tells her in the foyer. “But I couldn’t wait forever, and I figured you’d never be back.”
“Try the cheese!” Celeste shrieks.
“This is my family,” Rachel thinks, as she regrets her decision to stop drinking. “It’s not easy to come back here, not easy to find my place again, like a book I abandoned midway through and lost the thread of.” More perplexing is the looming influence of the woman who’s not even there anymore. Somehow, death has only exaggerated the presence of her “criminally neglectful mentally ill mother.”
Mom’s past offenses accrue slowly in painful memories and revealing dialogue. Conversations that Rachel and Celeste have avoided for years start to turn like the rusty gears of an old engine — sometimes with explosive results. Robbed of the helpful distraction of her work, Rachel must finally start to reconsider the “cruel, drunk, wayward, beautiful, intelligent, crazy” woman who raised her and eventually sent her running away. It’s a deft and honest record of how a damaged person can acknowledge that her mother was a monster while also coming to appreciate “her idiosyncratic dignity, her preening flamboyance, her dogged zest to experience life to the fullest.”
The success of this novel, Christensen’s eighth, rests wholly on her ability to create the artful illusion of ricocheting events — sudden swerves of grief, chance encounters that spiral toward disaster and a series of setbacks that pile up Job-like at the worst possible time. “Welcome Home, Stranger” could have been merely a satisfying, somber story about coming to terms with family trauma, but Christensen doesn’t let Rachel just wallow in old resentments. Even as we learn more about the toxic influence of Mom’s “jealous narcissism,” Rachel finds the remaining buttresses of her life knocked away until she’s got essentially nothing left but her own determination. In the end, her scientific knowledge and analytical acumen are of no use in trying to understand her own spirit. She’ll need other skills she’s long ignored.
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The result is a heartening story about a 53-year-old single woman in a dying industry who feels invisible and adrift. “The only power I have right now,” she says, “is in moving on, adapting, and surmounting my own sudden irrelevance. I’m still alive.”
As it turns out, that inspiring proclamation — just halfway through the novel — is woefully premature. But “Welcome Home, Stranger” finally arrives at the most lovely ending of a novel I’ve read all year.
Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.
Welcome Home, Stranger
By Kate Christensen
Harper. 214 pp. $28.99
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