Run

In Ann Patchett's novel, moms die, leave and reappear. BY LEAH HAGER COHEN AMONG the many things to admire about Ann Patchett is the lack of frivolity in her prose. She prefers nouns and verbs to crowded flights of lyrical adjectives and adverbs, and she doesn't dally excessively over a pretty phrase. Patchett is more hammer and nails than glue and lace; small wonder, then, that her books tend to be such solid, weight-bearing constructions. The wonder is that they so often manage to be transportingly beautiful too. The opening chapter of "Run," her fifth novel, offers a near-perfect example of her particular strengths. With little fanfare and no preamble, she tells how Bernard Doyle, an Irish Catholic Bostonian politician, came to marry a redheaded beauty, have one son, adopt two more - a pair of African-American brothers - and, four years later, lose his wife to cancer. All this is related in deceptively matter-of-fact language. The enormity of Doyle's grief immediately following Bernadette's death is more moving for being conveyed in a single sentence: "He was still expecting his wife to come down the stairs and ask him if he felt like splitting an orange." At the center of this chapter lies a story-within-a-story, the tale of a family heirloom, a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary obtained through theft and used to deceive. Passed down through generations, the statue so resembles Bernadette, its latest owner, that after her death it takes on an almost eerie significance. Placed in the boys' room, it "watched them from the dresser while they slept." Absent mothers who are not entirely absent; present mothers who are not what they appear to be - these are the novel's governing themes. Almost all the action unfolds over the course of one night and the following day. Sixteen years after Bernadette's death, Tip and Teddy, her adopted sons, are university students. Doyle, now the former mayor of Boston, has invited them to a Jesse Jackson lecture. Although neither brother has "the slightest interest in hearing what Jesse Jackson had to say," they accept, expressing their reluctance passively, by arriving late. But Doyle, anticipating this, has outwitted them by lying about the time the event will start. Indirection, passivity and manipulation characterize the relationships of Doyle and his sons. Yet we are meant to understand that they love one another. When Teddy, who is 6-foot-3, arrives at the lecture hall and leans "in from the aisle to kiss his father on the head," we see the gesture as it would likely be seen by those around them: a surprising display of affection between a strapping young black man and an aging white one. Just a few paragraphs later, we are reminded of the burden, shared by all three men, of being continually subjected to other people's misperceptions. When Teddy and Doyle begin talking, members of the audience "wondered if he was making the older man uncomfortable. No one . . . wondered if they were father and son." Outside, after the lecture, Doyle presses his sons to accompany him to a reception. Tip uncharacteristically asserts his will and declines, albeit with a sense of shame ("He wished he were more like Teddy, able to . . . be pleasant, think of the good"), and it is at this rare moment of differentiating himself from his father's wishes that he steps back off a curb and is struck, not by the oncoming car he has failed to notice but by a woman who pushes him to safety, and is herself then hit. The novel's plot hinges on the identity of this mysterious woman, rushed to the hospital with serious injuries, and of her daughter, a preternaturally poised 11-year-old who insists on going home with the Doyles. That the little girl, Kenya, is black contributes to the ease with which the Doyles are able to take her away from the hospital with no questions asked. "A random little black girl?" Tip remarks. "I don't think anyone's going to stop us at the door." Patchett builds up a good deal of tension in these early scenes, drawing on a host of weighty subjects: interracial adoption, familial allegiances and rivalries, Boston's notoriously complex political and racial history. And she would seem a fit candidate to take them on. Her most recent novel, "Bel Canto," dealt with the multiethnic politics of revolution; her novel "Taft" had a black male protagonist; and her memoir, "Truth and Beauty," navigated loyalty and betrayal with an astounding mixture of warmth and perspicacity. All of which makes it surprising that "Run" shies away from the thorniest questions Patchett implicitly raises: What does it mean when a white politician adopts black sons in a city where many black constituents live in poverty? How has their upbringing informed Tip and Teddy's sense of themselves as black men? And what prompts a smart, healthy, competent black woman to give up not only her infant son but then, days later - upon spotting a newspaper photo of the smiling white couple who have adopted her newborn - his 14-month-old brother? As portrayed, her decision not only strains credulity but carries troubling implications about the maternal instincts and capacities of black women. If Patchett had exhumed her characters' motivations more thoroughly, she might have persuaded readers of the circumstances that led to such a choice. And in so doing she might have elicited deeper sympathy and interest. The Jesse Jackson lecture turns out to be little more than a set piece, and the characters' racial identities are either ignored or too broadly indicated. (Kenya and her mother live in a housing project; Kenya, Tip and Teddy are all endowed with a stereotypical black athletic gift, a talent for running.) It's difficult to understand why an author would seed her story with potentially rich material only to refrain from exploring it. But this might explain why Patchett's characters ultimately feel less real than symbolic, as wooden as the Virgin's statue. Leah Hager Cohen's most recent book is a novel, "House Lights."

Run LP A Novel Chapter One Bernadette had been dead two weeks when her sisters showed up in Doyle's living room asking for the statue back. They had no legal claim to it, of course, she never would have thought of leaving it to them, but the statue had been in their family for four generations, passing down a maternal line from mother to daughter, and it was their intention to hold with tradition. Bernadette had no daughters. In every generation there had been an uncomfortable moment when the mother had to choose between her children as there was only one statue and these Irish Catholic families were large. The rule in the past had always been to give it to the girl who most resembled the statue, and among Bernadette and her siblings, not that the boys ever had a chance, Bernadette was the clear winner: iron rust hair, dark blue eyes, a long, narrow nose. It was frankly unnerving at times how much the carving looked like Bernadette, as if she had at some point modeled in a blue robe with a halo stuck to the back of her head. "I can't give it to you," Doyle said. "It's in the little boys' room, on the dresser. Tip and Teddy say a prayer to it at night." He kept his eyes on them steadily. He waited for an apology, some indication of backing down, but instead they just kept staring right at him. He tried again. "They believe it's actually a statue of her ." "But since we have daughters," Serena said, she was the older of the two, "and the statue always passes on to a daughter--" She didn't finish her thought because she felt the point had been made. She meant to handle things gracefully. Doyle was tired. His grief was so fresh he hadn't begun to see the worst of it yet. He was still expecting his wife to come down the stairs and ask him if he felt like splitting an orange. "It has in the past but it isn't a law. It can go to a son for one generation and everyone will survive." They looked at each other. These two women, these aunts, had supported their now dead sister in her limitless quest for children but they knew that Doyle didn't mean for the family's one heirloom to pass to Sullivan, his oldest son. He meant for the statue to go to the other ones, the "little boys" as everyone called them. And why should two adopted sons, two black adopted sons, own the statue that was meant to be passed down from redheaded mother to redheaded daughter? "Because," Doyle said, "I own it now and so I'm the one who gets to decide. Bernadette's children are as entitled to their family legacy as any other Sullivan cousin." Bernadette had always predicted that without a daughter there was going to be trouble. Two of the boys would have to be hurt someday when it was given to the third. Still, Bernadette had never imagined this. The aunts did their best to exercise decorum. They loved their sister, they grieved for her, but they weren't about to walk away from that to which they were entitled. Their next stop was to seek the intervention of their uncle. As both a priest and a Sullivan they thought he would see the need to keep the statue in their line, but much to their surprise, Father John Sullivan came down firmly on Doyle's side, chastising his nieces for even suggesting that Teddy and Tip should be forced to give up this likeness of their mother, having just given up Bernadette herself. If he hadn't closed the argument down then, chances are that none of the Sullivans would have ever spoken to any of the Doyles again. It was a very pretty statue as those things go, maybe a foot and a half high, carved from rosewood and painted with such a delicate hand that many generations later her cheeks still bore the high, translucent flush of a girl startled by a compliment. Likenesses of the Mother of God abounded in the world and in Boston they were doubled, but everyone who saw this statue agreed that it possessed a certain inestimable loveliness that set it far apart. It was more than just the attention to detail--the tiny stars carved around the base that earth sat on, the gentle drape of her sapphire cloak--it was Mary's youth, how she hovered on the line between mother and child. It was the fact that this particular Mother of God was herself an Irish girl who wore nothing on her head but a thin wooden disc the size of a silver dollar and leafed in gold. Bernadette's mother had given her the statue for a wedding present, and it wasn't until they were home from their wedding trip to Maine and were putting things away in their overlarge house on Union Park that Doyle really stopped to look at what was now theirs. He got very close to it then and peered at the face for a long time. He reached a conclusion that he thought was original to him. "This thing really looks like you," he said. "I know," Bernadette said. "That's why I got it." Doyle had certainly seen the statue in her parents' house, but he had never gone right up to it before. His did not have the kind of faith that believed religious statuary was appropriate for living rooms, and now here it was in his own living room, staring down at them from the mantel. He mentioned this to Bernadette. In that bright empty room there was no place else to rest your eyes. The Virgin looked so much larger, holier, than she had in the clutter of her parents' house. "You don't think it's a bit overtly Catholic?" her young husband asked. Bernadette cocked her head and tried to divorce herself from her history. She tried to see it as something new. "It's art," she said. "It's me. Pretend that she's naked." Run LP A Novel . Copyright © by Ann Patchett. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Run by Ann Patchett 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.