(Author’s Note: The recent tragedy in Maui got me thinking about one of my favorite novels of the past twenty years, The Descendants, which is set nearby. I am reposting this essay about it as a kind of semi-tribute.)
Even though I fancy myself a literary fiction writer (even when I’m writing detective or sci-fi novels), I don’t read that much literary fiction. I read a ton when I was young, especially in college, and lately I’ve found it difficult to find novels that don’t seem derivative or poorly imagined or just downright silly. And for those rare books I do find engaging, I often arrive at them in circuitous ways.
Take Kaui Hart Hemmings’ celebrated novel, The Descendants. Like a lot of books I read, it became known to me from a movie adaptation, although, strangely enough, I didn’t actually see the movie. I was on a flight to Europe some years ago, on an older model jet that still had drop-down movie screen, and the in-flight movie was The Descendants. I didn’t pay for the earphones, but even as a silent film it looked interesting, with George Clooney skulking about some lush tropical landscape that I somehow knew was Hawaii. I looked the movie up on Imdb.com and found that it was based on a novel, so I looked that up. It was a debut novel and looked the kind of book I might like: a literary story, told from a single point-of-view, with relatively few characters, a vivid setting, a compressed time-span, and an intriguing premise.
So, I checked it out on Overdrive. And, man, was I lucky I did.
A few months ago, in a post about Paul Theroux’s Saint Jack, I alluded to Flannery O’Connor’s statement that every good novel is in some sense a whodunnit. That is, a novel should compel the reader to keep going so that they can solve the mystery—not of a murder, necessarily, but of a personality. Well, Hemmings takes this dictum to a marvelous extreme, somehow managing to imbue her story with a sense of mystery in the very first paragraph:
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.
They say that bad writing uses too many adjectives, and that good writing is all about verbs. In this case, the most significant word is a verbal—a participle, to be specific: “positioned”. Somehow, the instant our eyes take in that word, we know that something is terribly wrong in this imagined world. Ordinary people don’t get positioned; dead people do. And so, this single word, which comes from deep within the point-of-view of our narrator and protagonist, precipitates the crux of the entire novel.
The lady, we soon learn, is Joanie King, wife of Matt King, a high-powered lawyer who lives with his family in Hawaii. Although he looks Anglo, Matt is descended from native Hawaiian royalty and is currently charged with selling the vast estate that he and his many cousins have inherited.
This conflict might, by itself, serve as a sufficient premise for a novel, but Hemmings weaves a much denser canvas. Joanie has been in a coma for weeks—ever since suffering a head injury from a boating accident—and although Matt tells himself and his two daughters that she will soon make a miraculous recovery, he knows better.
Still, Hemmings is not done layering. She adds yet another—and most significant—problem to throw at Matt: he has come to suspect that Joanie was having an affair before her accident.
I have a nagging suspicion that she is, or was, in love with another man. When she was first admitted to Queen’s, I went through her wallet looking for her insurance card and found a note written on a small and stiff piece of blue paper that seemed designed for clandestine messages. The note said: Thinking of you. See you at Indigo.
The rest of the novel is dedicated to unraveling the mystery of that note—or, more specifically, the mystery of who Joanie really was and what their marriage was really about.
Things get even more complicated when Matt learns that his wayward teenaged daughter, Alex, knew of Joanie’s infidelity and that this knowledge was the cause of a rift between the two. Alex’s revelation leads to a quest. Accompanied by Alex, her stoner boyfriend, Sid, and Matt’s ferocious younger daughter, Scottie, Matt sets off to discover the identity of the man in question. What Matt will do with him once he finds him is the question that keeps the reader going.
If all this sounds very drear and heavy, please note that The Descendants is an extremely funny book. Much of the humor comes from Matt’s total befuddlement at the prospect of becoming the sole parent of his two smart and fiercely strong-willed daughters. Alex’s boyfriend, Sid, also serves as a source of comic relief (and, in one of the novel’s more inspired twists, a kind of redemption, too).
But still, at its core, The Descendants is a drama whose basic themes have been plumbed before. I was reminded of another excellent novel, Judith Guest’s Ordinary People. (Yes, that one was made into a movie, too.) Like Guest, Hemmings paints a portrait of a family whose essential dysfunction is revealed by a sudden tragedy. In Ordinary People, it is the death of a favorite son, which causes emotional aftershocks for the surviving son and his parents. Both books are, in some ways, concerned with the alienation that often attends the lives of people who hew too closely to socially prescribed roles: the hardworking (but distant) father and the socially active (but emotionally sterile) mother.
And, in both books, the mom comes off as a bit of a villain. But once senses that the real villain in The Descendants is money. Money haunts Matt King’s existence almost as much as the spirits of his long-dead Hawaiian ancestors. One significant detail is that Joanie’s head injury was the result of her crashing in a speedboat race, begging the obvious question: what kind of mom races speedboats? (Answer: a very rich one.) Matt confirms his life of entitlement to Joanie’s father even as he tries to deny his own wealth:
“We lived well,” I say. “Better than well. You think she was unhappy because I didn’t give her enough? Are you actually angry about this?”
“She wanted her own boat.”
“I couldn’t afford it! I don’t have that kind of money at my disposal. Things are tied up. We live off of my salary. I will use trust money to pay for college, and I use it for Punahou, which is twenty-eight thousand for the two of them. Plus voice and dance, summer camp. The list goes on.” The girls look startled and offended. That’s the thing with privileged kids—they forget their teachers get paid. They forget that everything costs something: being in a play, making a bong in glassblowing. I’m sure poor kids are aware of what everything costs. Every little thing. I look at the wall over Scott’s head and want to punch it. Why am I talking about tuition? Why am I defending myself?
It is money, too, that drives the final crisis of the novel regarding what Matt is going to do with the vast tract of virgin land he has been entrusted to dispense. Will he sell it? If so, to whom? His choice is complicated by his many good-natured but lazy cousins who are hoping for a big payday, and also by the terrible revelation that his Joanie’s lover may have been working, through her, to profit off the sale, too.
Since I’ve been rattling off chestnuts from creative writing class, let me add another: every good novel is about a rabbit who is being chased by a fox. Will the rabbit jump right or jump left?
You’ll have to read the book to find out.
Ash Clifton, Writer 