A Theory Of Relativity, by Jacquelyn Michard.
New York: HarperCollins, 2001.
$26 — 384 pages.

Novelists deserve a lighter hand from critics than do non-fiction writers. Novelists dwell in the camps of their own imagination while the writers of histories, cookbooks, travel guides and various other enterprises open themselves to criticism not only in the areas of style and originality, but also in the use of facts and the interpretation of data. Besides, novelists show a proclivity for strong drink and copious tears lacking in other less emotional writers. A few really vicious reviews might tip our novelist into appearing on the literary world’s list of “drunk and disorderly.”

Keeping this preface in mind, let us turn to Jacquelyn Mitchard and her latest book, A Theory Of Relativity .

Mitchard, the author of the well-written but morally confused The Deep End Of The Ocean, gives us in A Theory Of Relativity a story whose characters and plot line actually resemble the theory of relativity in that this story, like the theory, is easy to understand on the surface but is murky and complex in its depths. Relativity here is a play on the noun relative, or relation. The book explores the meaning of family in our modern world, of families that are broken so many times and in so many ways that the book in some respects negates its own story, becoming an unintentional satire on the family itself.

Gordon McKenna, protagonist of A Theory Of Relativity, is a biology teacher in Wisconsin, an adopted son of Mark and Lorraine. His sister, Georgia, is also adopted, though from a different natural mother. Georgia marries Ray, a Southerner and one of the country’s better amateur golfers, and they beget Keefer. Georgia gets cancer, and then she and Ray die in a car accident. Ray’s family consists of several groups of people, most notably his religious mother, his angry stepfather, a half-sister, and a real sister who becomes both ill and pregnant while fighting Gordon over the adoption of Keefer.

We follow Gordon through his trial to keep primary custody of Keefer: the battles in the courtroom, the personal battles with Rays family, Gordon’s attempt to understand his own adoptive family and his war against himself and his selfish past. Some of the courtroom action is engrossing. Judge Emily Sayward, for example, is a small, boyish, pretty woman who is aware of her looks as a defect in the courtroom, a judge who tries to find the truth and then rule on it. Mitchard’s many comments on trial law and adoption engage the reader’s interest.

Like a man wearing combat boots on a muddy road, however, I had a general sense of slogging through this book as I read it. With the exception of some of the dialogue, the writing plods along, plods along, plods along, so that I finally began to hurry my reading, skimming past pages. Such haste is always a mistake in a book with so many characters and turns of plot; I soon had trouble keeping track of the people, few of whom seemed well-defined, and twice I found myself unsure of who had custody of Keefer at a certain crucial moment in the story. Like a horse racing home to the barn, the final thirty pages of the book suddenly leap into a canter, giving the impression that Mitchard herself had become impatient with the story. This impression is strengthened when in the last five pages the author gives us a summation of each character’s life in a confusing essay written by the now ten year old Keefer.

Mitchard seems to have trouble bringing some of these people to life for the reader, particularly the members of Ray’s family, which may account for the fuzzy quality to the plot and characters of the book. I found myself pausing often to try to fit Delia and Diane, Dora and Nyle, back into the context of the story. At a memorial service in Florida for Ray and Georgia following their funeral in Wisconsin, for example, we hear Diane, Ray’s mother:

“There’s no God, or God is insane,” Diane went on. “Hi, Mark.” He touched Diane’s arm. “Hi, darlin’ baby girl. God might have needed one of them. But both of them? Raymond was .. he was a gift to the whole world.”

It’s not until this moment that we realize that Diane is struggling with her faith, that Keefer is present in the room, or that Diane is so tactless as to imply that Raymond’s death is somehow more important than Georgia’s. Diane might hold such thoughts, but the character as created in the book would never utter them, especially in front of Georgia’s parents. It is the multiplication of such moments that in the end undermines A Theory Of Relativity.

(Jeff Minick owns Saints and Scholars Bookstore in downtown Waynesville)

 

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