Ayelet Waldman’s new novel, Red Hook Road, rang true and pissed me off at the same time. Given that she’s also a terrific storyteller, I guess that’s the definition of a good read. But I’m not sure the author even knows that she really stepped in it with respect to parents with disabilities.
The novel revolves around two families in Maine — one “local,” the other “summer people” — over the course of four summers. The protagonists are the Summer People mother-of-the-bride and the Local People mother-of-the-groom in the wedding that opens the book. Clearly one of the things that Waldman is wrestling with is the Local/Summer dichotomy. I think she gets that right, though I’m more Summer than Local. Interestingly, her Summer People are Jewish, while my Summer-People experience was as a half-Jewish kid in an enclave of WASPs. If you think I need more blog therapy about that, YOU’RE RIGHT! But not today.
So Waldman’s focus is the Local/Summer relationship, which I tend to think of in my judgmental way as sort of colonial: the Summer People bring necessary dollars and an appalling set of class distinctions to the Local community. But as with most things, it’s more subtle than I’m generally willing to expend the effort to understand. And I think Waldman goes a long way toward expending that effort. She also appears to credibly inhabit the head of the Local mother, though she has said elsewhere that her experience is as a Summer Person.
For all her sensitivity to the Local side of the equation, I was intrigued and pissed off by the way she portrayed the ultimately successful campaign of the Summer family to convince the Local family to permit Samantha — their adopted Cambodian niece and a violin prodigy — to live in New York. Given how hard she was working to balance Local vs. Summer, I kept expecting Local family ties to prevail over the pull of musical excellence. Was it easier to let New York prevail because Samantha had by definition already been uprooted from her birth country? Was it a determination to frustrate the reader’s expectation that family would prevail? Either way, Iris, the Summer mother who leads the campaign to bring Samantha to New York, has to work hard to convince the Local family that life in that city will be better for her — against the explicit objections of the Local mother (Samantha’s aunt) that family is more important. Yet the transition to New York from rural Maine is portrayed as cost-free to Samantha, who is simply thrilled to develop her musical gift and meet other Asian kids in the mix. “[Y]ears later, after she’d graduated from Juilliard, . . . Bach’s Partita no. 2 in D Minor became a staple of her own repertoire, and the basis of her first solo recording.” Without elaboration, we learn that the move is all good — for her and for the musical world.
This touches too glancingly I think on what it means to take a kid from her birth family and raise her somewhere that is judged to be better for her. It is interesting that Samantha has, by definition, been the object of two such decisions: to adopt her from Cambodia; and then to take her from Maine to New York. But I want to talk about another taking that I’m guessing Waldman had no idea she stumbled into: the fact that the last stop on Iris’s campaign of persuasion is with the Cambodian girl’s mother, Connie, a woman with a mental illness who “had been in and out of the psychiatric hospital.” Iris’s pitch centers around the girl’s incredible talent and the vast musical opportunities that she will have in New York that she could not possibly have in Maine. But — in what I perceived as a Local vs. Summer get-out-of-jail-free card — Waldman has Connie hand over Samantha to Iris with this blessing: “I have failed that girl. . . . . I took her in, I made her mine, and then I started to do her damage almost right away.” Iris objects: “You haven’t damaged her.” Connie: “But she will be if I keep her. She’s got a gift, and she deserves to be surrounded by people who understand how good she is. I owe it to her to give her to you.”
As a good liberal, Waldman would likely be aware of the appalling history of, say, Native American adoption — a history in which the state forcibly took Native America children from their families and placed them with white families in the name of providing a “better” upbringing. This program later came to be recognized as misguided and led to the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act.
But she appears unaware of the fact that the state still forcibly takes children from parents with disabilities. As recently as last month, authorities in Missouri placed a newborn in foster care because her parents were blind. A few years ago, Montana authorities investigated the ability of one quadriplegic mother to care for her child while the boyfriend of another, in Illinois, sued for full custody on the theory that she could not care for her child.
My friend Carrie Lucas has established a program called Center for Rights of Parents with Disabilities to tackle these and other issues stemming from the stereotype that people with disabilities can’t be good parents and to help such parents find the community support they need. The links above show that this is by no means simple territory to write about. My beef with Waldman is not that she portrayed Samantha’s mother as having a mental illness, but that she so blithely assumed it justified taking her kid. I predict she would not, in this day and age, have a Native American mom tell a white woman, essentially, “I’ve failed her; you take her.” But that’s precisely what she did with a mom with a disability.
Extra bonus stepping-in-it: Waldman’s evident ignorance of the independent living movement. Connie says, of being institutionalized: “You know why I like it here so much? . . It’s an asylum.” Her daughter corrects her: “It’s a mental health institute . . .” not an asylum. Connie: “No, they don’t call it that no more. But that’s what it is. An asylum. A place of refuge, like. A sanctuary. It’s a good word, asylum. I wish people didn’t mind using it. Most of us could use an asylum sometimes. A refuge from the world.” Um, no, but that’s another column entirely.
Like it? Hate it? Let me know!
Basking in the shade.
Thought Snax 
