The children's crusade A novel

HOW DO WE become who we are? There are many ways of approaching this slipperiest of questions, from the experimental rigor of cognitive neuroscience to the teasing excavations of psychoanalysis. It is, of course, natural territory for the novel, and though Ann Packer's "The Children's Crusade" follows one nuclear family, its scope is broadened by its attempts at an answer. The novel tells the story of the four Blair siblings, each in varying stages of unhappiness: Robert, an insecure and inwardly raging doctor; Rebecca, a grounded psychiatrist married to an immunologist; Ryan, a dreamy and almost painfully sensitive school-teacher; and James, the sole sibling to have moved far from the family's hometown in Northern California, and the novel's prodigal son. James's failure to acquire the trappings of middle-class life - he pursues an affair with a married woman, and perhaps more troubling, has a job at the local Costco - is enough to identify him as the problem sibling, a fact that tells us much about the world Packer is depicting. Its most immediate literary antecedent is Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" (which also features a depressed eldest son, an errant younger son and a sympathetic daughter). Packer observes the discontents of this milieu with a careful eye, at once shrewd and just. "The Children's Crusade" is deftly structured, running on two alternating tracks. The first describes the siblings' fretful childhood, raised by a saintly pediatrician father and a mercurial artist mother. The second leaps forward in time to follow the children's unremarkable, middle-aged fate. They are still unhappy, but in ways that are both more worldly and more diffuse. The novel's structure thus sets up some large questions: To what degree are we shaped by our childhoods? Can we circumvent the influence of the past? Nature versus nurture? After a brief prologue, in which the origin myth of the family is related in some of Packer's best and most rapturous prose, childhood emerges as the true sacred space of the novel - not because it represents innocence, but because it might contain the key to decoding the adult self. As children, the siblings live in a state of near permanent anxiety, in large part owing to the negligence of their mother, Penny, who withdraws from her family and into a nascent artistic career. It's unclear how seriously we are to take her creative practice, which sometimes sounds derivative and parochial; what's never in doubt is the urgency of her need for solitude. "The Children's Crusade" bears a glancing resemblance to Packer's first novel, "The Dive From Clausen's Pier." That novel's narrator is engaged to a man paralyzed in a diving accident, and is both guilt-stricken and self-preserving: She flees her fiancé and goes to New York, but eventually returns, abandoning a course in fashion design, of which she calmly observes, "I wasn't going to have that after all." In Penny, "The Children's Crusade" arms that female narrator with greater ruthlessness, before focusing a forensic eye on the fallout of her retreat. Packer is a connoisseur of the selfish act - both its necessity and its consequences. But how direct is the causal relationship between the mother's absence and the adult child's unhappiness? The four Blair children, although brought up in the same household, have radically different responses to their parents' failings. And to some extent, the novel insists that the children are themselves from the earliest moments of their childhood, the essence of their character already determined. Still, Packer makes several runs at a psychoanalytic explanation for the root problem of James's behavior. (Although Rebecca's husband is a scientist for whom "the mind and its mysteries don't hold a candle to the brain," the domain of neuroscience is only indicated, never really explored.) For example, Rebecca's research leads her to the theory that "James's chaotic character reflected an insecure-ambivalent attachment to their neglectful and distracted mother. ... James had suffered maternal deprivation." That assessment is too glib to be taken seriously, and many of the psychoanalytic ideas are undercut by their presentation in the novel. Packer seems to give more credence to the subtle ways events from the past recur, creating pathways into the present. The recollection of James's childhood poison oak rash persists, conflated with a separate classroom memory: "For the rest of his life he would associate the terrible days of his poison oak with the letter F, never realizing it was the down, up, down, up - sit, stand, sit, stand; the same motions as on his first day with Miss McKinley - that linked them in his mind." these uncanny reverberations are prime material for fiction, and as a form, the novel is uniquely positioned to explore the complexities of how character comes into being. "The Children's Crusade" is beautifully observed but somewhat undermined by the gestures it makes at areas it seems reluctant to fully occupy. Packer never addresses the central question of her novel with much force, and as a whole, the book remains curiously polite. Having covered more traumatic terrain in her previous novels - the accident in "The Dive From Clausen's Pier," suicide in "Songs Without Words" - Packer here restricts herself to the rhythms and landscape of ordinary life, as it is lived by the vast majority. But ordinary life also brings us face to face with the void; therein lies its terror. In "The Children's Crusade," this confrontation takes place largely offstage, most notably in the figure of Penny. The wreckage of her passion is the substance of the novel, even if we never see her emotion face on. In this sense, Freud was right - it's still all about the mother. KATIE KITAMURA'S most recent novel is "Gone to the Forest."