The descendants A novel

"THE DESCENDANTS" is a Pandora's box-style tragicomedy in which a swirl of emotional debris is flung at the narrator, who is smashed and pounded and yet each time rises to be smashed and pounded again. Matt King, a wealthy Honolulu attorney, has had a grave shock: his wife, Joanie, has been injured in a boat-racing accident and now lies in the hospital in a vegetative state. In the painful depths of this crisis, King tries to repair his relationship with his two daughters, then struggles with the revelation that before her accident his wife had been in love with another man. The novel's mounting chaos owes something to the Updike school of domestic trauma, though Hemmings's central character is a more sinned against than sinning version of Rabbit Angstrom. King's worst crime is obliviousness: in the course of the narrative he realizes that, transfixed by professional baubles, he hardly noticed when his wife stopped loving him or when his daughters became mired in anger and rebellion. As reality intrudes in the form of kindly doctors telling him the worst about his wife, King is obliged to reassess his priorities. Once scrutinized, his children seem like exotic creatures, unknowable and vaguely terrifying. Scottie, a precocious 10-year old, wears provocatively sloganed T-shirts and harasses her peers by text message. Seventeen-year-old Alex is working off her drug addiction at an expensive boarding school while dating a pothead who punctuates his stoner trance with gnomic utterances. Much of the novel's comedy derives from King's desperate attempts to rein in his daughters and their disdainful responses to his overdue ministrations. He takes Scottie to the hospital to see her mother and asks her to whisper innocuous anecdotes in Joanie's ear. Instead, she turns the visit into a confessional, pouring out scenes of youthful humiliation - "crisis, mystery, violence" - as her father desperately tries to censor her. The daughters are highly plausible in their gum-cracking insecurities, their phony toughness, their desire for love. The generational battle lines are clearly demarcated as King wonders if "our offspring have all decided to give up. They'll never be senators or owners of a football team; they'll never be the West Coast president of NBC, the founder of Weight Watchers, the inventor of shopping carts, a prisoner of war, the No. 1 supplier of the world's macadamia nuts. No, they'll do coke and smoke pot and take creative writing classes and laugh at us." Perceiving that his children have been ruined by privilege and consigned to aimlessness, King also squirms under the imagined reproach of his ancestors. The scion of an aristocratic mixed-race Hawaiian landowning family, he's aware that things have become shoddy of late: "My Polynesian ancestors would be disappointed in me, in all of us." Trying to take charge, King gives the order to switch off his wife's life-support machine. While Joanie begins to die, he decides to confront her lover - and takes his daughters along with him. Hemmings relishes this interlude, a carefully fashioned perversion of the family holiday: the wife declining in the hospital, the cuckolded husband stalking the lover, the children splashing far from innocently in the waves. Hemmings is a determinedly unsentimental writer, and she manages her hazardous subject matter - all of it ripe for strenuous melodrama - in a dry, understated way, subverting her characters without reducing them utterly. King's schemes are gently deflated, his notions of family bonding and grand occasion shown to be consoling fantasies, not fit for the real world. Perhaps because of Hemmings's fear of schmaltz, the narrative is occasionally bathetic: the moment when King confronts Joanie's lover is elliptically dispatched, as is his wife's death. The narrative has been coursing toward these scenes, but Hemmings hurries through them, depriving the reader of a decent view. Yet King's voice is persuasive, in his pared-down lyricism as much as in his comic bemusement. "Large swells move near the wind sock, yet they don't break," he observes, canoeing out into the ocean to dispose of Joanie's cremated remains. "One moves under us, and the canoe glides to its crest, then comes down hard. The nose slashes through the water, and as we approach the next wave, which seems bigger than the last, I push the bag of ashes more snugly between my legs." It's worth noting that Hemmings is yet another young female novelist who has chosen to depict an older male protagonist, joining the ranks of, among others, Nicole Krauss in "The History of Love" and Zadie Smith in "On Beauty." One wonders, reading them, whether their troubled men have been created as a form of homage to writers like Roth, Updike and Bellow, or whether they betray a certain anxiety of seriousness: that up-and-coming and even established female authors, fearful of their work being ghettoized as "women's writing," place male characters at the center of their work. If this is the case, then Kaui Hart Hemmings has no need of such defenses: her comic sense is finely honed in this refreshingly wry debut novel. 'My Polynesian ancestors would be disappointed in me,' the lawyer narrator of Hemmings's novel remarks. Joanna Kavenna is the author of "The Ice Museum," about the land of Thule, and a novel, "Inglorious," which has just been published.

1 the sun is shining, mynah birds are chattering, palm trees are swaying, so what. I'm in the hospital and I'm healthy. My heart is beating as it should. My brain is firing off messages that are loud and clear. My wife is on the upright hospital bed, positioned the way people sleep on airplanes, her body stiff, head cocked to the side. Her hands are on her lap. "Can't we lay her flat?" I ask. "Wait," my daughter Scottie says. She takes a picture of her mother, a Polaroid. She fans herself with the photo, and I press the button on the side of the bed to lower my wife's upper body. I release the button when she is almost flat on her back. Joanie has been in a coma for twenty-three days, and in the next few days I'll have to make some decisions based on our doctor's final verdict. Actually, I'll just have to find out what the doctor has to say about Joanie's condition. I don't have any decisions to make, since Joanie has a living will. She, as always, makes her own decisions. Today is Monday. Dr. Johnston said we'll talk on Tuesday, and this appointment is making me nervous, as though it's a romantic date. I don't know how to act, what to say, what to wear. I rehearse answers and reactions, but I've nailed only the lines that respond to favorable scenarios. I haven't rehearsed Plan B. "There," Scottie says. Her real name is Scottie. Joanie thought it would be cool to name her after Joanie's father, Scott. I have to disagree. I look at the photo, which looks like those joke snapshots everyone takes of someone sleeping. I don't know why we think they're so funny. There's a lot that can be done to you while you're sleeping. This seems to be the message. Look how vulnerable you are, the things you aren't aware of. Yet in this picture you know she isn't just sleeping. Joanie has an IV and something called an endotracheal tube running out of her mouth to a ventilator that helps her breathe. She is fed through a tube and is administered enough medication to sustain a Fijian village. Scottie is documenting our life for her social studies class. Here's Joanie at Queen's Hospital, her fourth week in a coma, a coma that has scored a 10 on the Glasgow scale and a III on the Rancho Los Amigos scale. She was in a race and was launched from an offshore powerboat going eighty miles an hour, but I think she will be okay. "She reacts nonpurposefully to stimuli in a nonspecific manner, but occasionally, her responses are specific though inconsistent." This is what I've been told by her neurologist, a young woman with a slight tremor in her left eye and a fast way of talking that makes it hard to ask questions. "Her reflexes are limited and often the same, regardless of stimuli presented," she says. None of this sounds good to me, but I'm assured Joanie's still holding on. I feel she'll be okay and one day able to function normally. I'm generally right about things. "What was she racing for?" the neurologist asked. The question confused me. "To win, I guess. To get to the end first." "shut this off," I tell Scottie. She finishes pasting the picture into her book then turns off the television with the remote. "No, I mean this." I point to the stuff in the window--the sun and trees, the birds on the grass hopping from crumb to crumb thrown by tourists and crazy ladies. "Turn this off. It's horrible." The tropics make it difficult to mope. I bet in big cities you can walk down the street scowling and no one will ask you what's wrong or encourage you to smile, but everyone here has the attitude that we're lucky to live in Hawaii; paradise reigns supreme. I think paradise can go fuck itself. "Disgusting," Scottie says. She slides the stiff curtain across the window, shutting all of it out. I hope she can't tell that I'm appraising her and that I'm completely worried by what I see. She's excitable and strange. She's ten. What do people do during the day when they're ten? She runs her fingers along the window and mumbles, "This could give me bird flu," and then she forms a circle around her mouth with her hand and makes trumpet noises. She's nuts. Who knows what's going on in that head of hers, and speaking of her head, she most definitely could use a haircut or a brushing. There are small tumbleweeds of hair resting on the top of her head. Where does she get haircuts? I wonder. Has she ever had one before? She scratches her scalp, then looks at her nails. She wears a shirt that says i'm not that kind of girl. but i can be! I'm grateful that she isn't too pretty, but I realize this could change. I look at my watch. Joanie gave it to me. "The hands glow and the face is mother-of-pearl," she said. "How much did it cost?" I asked. "How did I know that would be the very first thing you said about it?" I could see she was hurt, that she put a lot of work into selecting the gift. She loves giving gifts, paying attention to people so she can give them a gift that says she took the time to know and listen to them. At least it seems like that's what she does. I shouldn't have asked about the price. She just wanted to show that she knew me. "What time is it?" Scottie asks. "Ten-thirty." "It's still early." "I know," I say. I don't know what to do. We're here not only because we're visiting and hoping Joanie has made some progress during the night, reacting to light and sound and painful jabs, but also because we have nowhere else to go. Scottie's in school all day and then Esther picks her up, but this week I felt she should spend more time here and with me, so I took her out of school. "What do you want to do now?" I ask. She opens her scrapbook, a project that seems to occupy all of her time. "I don't know. Eat." "What would you usually do now?" "Be in school." "What if it were Saturday? What would you do then?" "Beach." I try to think of the last time she was completely in my care and what we did together. I think it was when she was around one, one and a half. Joanie had to fly to Maui for a shoot and couldn't find a babysitter, and her parents couldn't do it, for some reason. I was in the middle of a trial and stayed home but absolutely had to get some work done, so I put Scottie in the bathtub with a bar of soap. I watched to see what happened. She splashed and tried to drink the bathwater, and then she found the soap and reached to grab it. It eluded her grasp and she tried again, a look of wonder on her small face, and I slipped out into the hall, where I had set up a workstation and a baby monitor. I could hear her laughing, so I knew she wasn't drowning. I wonder if this would still work: putting her in a tub with a slippery bar of Irish Spring. "We can go to the beach," I say. "Would Mom take you to the club?" "Well, duh. Where else would we go?" "Then it's a plan. After you talk and we see a nurse, we'll check in at home, then go." Scottie takes a picture out of her album, crushes it in her hand, and throws it away. I wonder what the picture was, if it was the one of her mother on the bed, probably not the best family relic. "I wish," Scottie says. "What do I wish?" It's one of our games. Every now and then she names a place she wishes we were besides this place, this time in our lives. "I wish we were at the dentist," she decides. "Me, too. I wish we were getting our mouths x-rayed." "And Mom was getting her teeth whitened," she says. I really do wish we were at Dr. Branch's office, the three of us getting high on laughing gas and feeling our numb lips. A root canal would be a blast compared to this. Or any medical procedure, really. Actually, I wish I could be home working. I have to make a decision on who should own the land that has been in my family since the 1840s. This sale will eliminate all of my family's land holdings, and I desperately need to study up on the facts before the meeting I have with my cousins six days from now. That's our deadline. Two o'clock at Cousin Six's house six days from today. We'll approve a buyer. It's irresponsible of me to have put off thinking about this deal for so long, but I guess this is what our family has done for a while now. We've turned our backs to our legacy, waiting for someone else to come along and assume both our fortune and our debts. I'm afraid Esther may have to take Scottie to the beach, and I'm about to tell her, but then I don't because I feel ashamed. My wife is in the hospital, my daughter needs her parents, and I need to work. Once again I'm putting her in the tub. I see Scottie staring at her mother. She has her back against the wall, and she's fumbling with the hem of her shirt. "Scottie," I say. "If you're not going to say anything, then we may as well leave." "Okay," she says. "Let's go." "Don't you want to tell your mother what's going on in school?" "She never cares about what's going on in school." "What about your extracurricular activities? Your schedule's fuller than the president's. Your scrapbook, show her that. Or what did you make in glassblowing the other day?" "A bong," she says. I look at her closely before responding. She doesn't appear to have said anything remarkable. I never know if she knows what she's talking about. "Interesting," I say. "What is a bong?" She shrugs. "Some high school guy taught me how to make it. He said it would go well with chips and salsa and any other food I could think of. It's some kind of platter." "Do you still have this . . . bong?" "Sort of," she says. "But Mr. Larson told me to make it into a vase. I could put flowers in it and give it to her." She points at her mother. "That's a great idea!" She eyes me skeptically. "You don't have to get all Girl Scout about it." "Sorry," I say. I lean back in my chair and look at all the holes in the ceiling. I don't know why I'm not worried, but I'm just not. I know Joanie will be okay because she always makes it out okay. She will wake up and Scottie will have a mother and we can talk about our marriage and I can put my suspicions aside. I'll sell the property and buy Joanie a boat, something that will shock her and make her throw her head back and laugh. "Last time you were the one in the bed," Scottie says. "Yup." "Last time you lied to me." "I know, Scottie. Forgive me." She's referring to my stint in the hospital. I had a minor motorcycling accident. I crashed at the track, soaring over the handlebars into a pile of red dirt. At home, after the wreck, I told Joanie and Scottie what had happened but insisted I was okay and that I wasn't going to the hospital. Scottie issued me these little tests to demonstrate my unreliability. Joanie participated. They played bad cop, worse cop. "How many fingers?" Scottie asked, holding up what I thought was a pinky and a thumb. "Balls," I said. I didn't want to be tested this way. "Answer her," Joanie said. "Two?" From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.