The sum of memory is what makes us
By Dale Neal

Good fiction constructs in words the way we live and think. Incidents set in memory serve as the brick; imagination supplies the mortar. Word by word, a good writer builds a facade of reality, then stands back to let time haunt the house.

In his evocative second novel, “I Am Zoë Handke,” Eric Larsen proves a literature architect of quiet but high ambition, drafting a book with rich passages and still rooms that make the reader linger on the tour.

The guide is the title character and narrator, Zoë Handke, a character from Larsen’s first novel, “An American Memory,” which won the Chicago Tribune’s 1988 Heartland prize. In his second novel, Larsen fashions a portrait of this woman before she became a wife, from the memories she reveals of her childhood and strained relationship with her mother.

Her family, of course, is dysfunctional in the parlance of the 1980’s. The mother seethes with psychic rage and lies, while father and children maintain a shroud of silence and denial. Yet Larsen aims much higher than just another mother-daughter melodrama or a psychological coming-of-age ordeal. He wants to capture the very essence of mood and memory, how we remember both what we experience and dream. The writing is quiet but sure as he weaves together fleeting glimpses of a family’s past.

“In the back yard, our clothes would hang on lines as if we ourselves were exposed there, strewn in disarray, unanchored in time and space. Headless or armless, with empty legs or footless, we hung upside down, or sideways, or right side up in a spectacle of disorder, dismemberment, and madness, the empty and dislocated pieces of us—my grandmother’s empty print dresses, my father’s work pants and shirts, varieties of mournfully isolated socks and pieces of absurdly large and small underwear, the flared cotton skirts my mother wore—a kaleidoscope of broken pieces touched into vestigial twitches of movement by passing breezes or, on windy days, flapping like a ludicrous gathering of the damned, raising, without voices, a chorus of discomfiture and lamentation.”

Raised in Three Islands, Ill., outside Chicago, Zoë paints vivid portraits of the barges on the canal, the feel of summer nights, the domestic familiarity of a childhood home.

First among her memories is that of her aunt Leonora, a gentle farm woman whom Zoë wished for her own mother. But the aunt dies from an aneurysm while gathering eggs in the hen house. Alone at home when the fateful telephone call comes, Zoë, then 13, must relay the tragic news to her family when they arrive. In a terrible scene, her mother calls Zoë a liar and pulls her hair, until pulled away by her father. “I think now, after all, that what my mother wanted at that terrible moment in the kitchen doorway was to kill me.”

That Zoë survived in the wake of her mother’s abusive behavior is testament to her own character. But once free of her mother’s wrath, Zoë herself seems to slip into eccentricity and obsession when she goes off to college at West Tree, Minn. Her formerly eloquent introspection seems only sophomoric as she describes her choice of a major based on the moods of the science building, the gymnasium, and finally the humanities hall, where she suffers hysterical episodes of deafness and blindness brought on by the onslaught of memory.

Larsen’s style turns overly literary here with a showy performance of punctuation. He nestles Zoë’s observations one with the other in long parenthetical series, ending the section with six consecutive parentheses.

In the final section, Larsen brings Zoë into the present, living in New York with a husband and two daughters, contending with her mother’s death, a bloody suicide in a bathroom. “My mother’s death did not end. Beginning far in the stopped past, it grew with a greedy, unerring, crafted, and painstaking slowness: at last occurred; and then continued, still feasting on the dead flesh of time.

After a series of strange half-remembered dreams, Zoë begins the journal of her childhood memories that becomes the novel the reader has just finished reading.

With the blunt title of his book, “I Am Zoë Handke,” Larsen suggests the sum of memory is what makes us. In the slow but steady accretion of flashback, recollection and dream, this skillful writer carefully creates an intriguing character study and haunting episodes that settle like real memories in the reader’s mind.

Second Novel is a masterful tale about a Midwest woman

By Bob Moyer

Exquisite, elegant, exceptional, eloquent—just a few of the words which all together do not add up to an adequate description of Eric Larsen’s companion novel to “An American Memory,” his prize-winning first novel about Malcolm Reiner. Zoë is the woman Reiner married at the conclusion of that novel, and her story, which complements his but still stands on its own, can only be summed up suitably with one word—classic.

Larsen has created a story which far surpasses just the poignant memoirs of a Midwest woman; at one and the same time, his carefully chiseled prose presents us as well with a voice transformed from a male pen to a female perspective; a case history of the curative powers of the creative will on the confusions of life; and a treatise on the true nature of language. His treatment has a resonance that belies the very tight dimensions of his story, that of Handke herself.

Larsen lets his masterful work begin with the voice, as we believe almost immediately in the transference from his design to her diction. Her voice flows almost flawlessly from his pen, pulling us into her recuperative process.

Pensively, she sorts through the emotional wreckage wrought upon her life by her disturbed mother. As Zoë sifts through the rubble, she will pick up a gem of a moment, turning it about until it is illuminated by a flash of elevated language.

When, for instance, Handke has just carefully captured the memory of her mother rushing from the door of the bathroom where she had been watching her to inexplicably discard and damage her books, Larsen lets us see the moment under the light of the succinct language of her summation: “I was a mirror. My mother wanted me broken.” The line reveals, not reports, the moment to the reader.

This rendering of the moment of consciousness into a metaphor manifests the magic the process produces both for her and the reader.

Since Zoe has sought solace through language, her ever-descending focus provides pristine definitions of the relationship between dead voices of the past and living language.

Zoe travels back through time to touch these suspended moments, “. . .hear also the vast and unwhispered nothingness of which they were at once the echoes, parents, and ancient children and to which they were now also the tiny doorways.”

It is in such precise pictures that Larsen captures Handke, her pain, and the possibility of release through the process of language.

Larsen leaves no loose ends here. As he weaves his story from the far past to the present, we of course come to be more aware of Zoe herself, until we see her sitting at her desk. There, Larsen finishes off the ageless story device not done nearly as well by writers such as John Barth.

His accomplishment speaks to us on levels that leave no doubt of his mastery. That accomplishment begins, and ends, with a good story.

Mother reveals secrets of family and herself in shimmering prose
By Ruth Moose

What is this, you ask, reading I am Zoë Handke. A faded family photo album? A box of dusty letters from a hidden attic cache or a journal someone wrote for oneself, to oneself and never expected anyone else to read? If you answer all of the above, then you’re with me. And the thing is, it’s all spellbinding and wonderful and absorbing and so startingly different you relish each delicious page. If I had to pick one sustaining image for the whole book, it would be an Amish quilt in the Shade and Sunlight pattern. The book moves from light to dark and back again; from warm and nostalgic to something sinister just out of the picture but casting a shadow across it, swinging like the hangman’s noose.

This is not your usual book. It is sections within sections nestled like Chinese boxes.

From the size and look and feel of the book, which is small enough to fit in one hand and compressed enough to tuck in the back corner of your mind, to the opening section in Alma, Ill., you are captivated by the prose. Zoë’s voice begins: “I am taller than my mother, although not very much so, perhaps an inch, certainly not more. But I am larger than she was. My bones are heavier, somewhat more angular, more squared-off with one another. My flesh is thicker. It seems to me that all my life, in comparison with my slighter and now vanished mother, I have been made to feel clumsy.

Section 2 moves to Three Islands, Ill., and we begin to get landscapes, images of light and air and water, again in the compelling voice of Zoe telling us of her mother’s lies. “I wonder if, in some child’s way, I was struck three and a half decades ago by the same thing that most impresses me now when I look back at that distant moment; by the easeful placidity and calmness, the restful satisfaction, the amazing and animal contentedness of my mother’s pretty face in the April sunlight after she had told me the story of the two young children drowned in the water of the canal, their faces eaten away by the sharp teeth of eels.”

In another section, we get a glimpse of Zoe’s maternal grandfather through his notebook and a list of 26 items that includes flowers, a kitchen drawer, cabinet radio, a white goose, a pot of beer, window shades, a job loss, a pair of knickers and a tweed cap, willow trees, and finally “this relationship: the street running in front of the house, the canal running in back.”

Plot does not carry you forward, but rather a mesmerization. You are held by some of the most shimmering prose ever put on paper.

Something does happen, but it’s so woven and overlaid by images, you can miss it. This is the life of a girl growing up in the Midwest caught between her mother’s madness (“I was a mirror. My mother wanted me broken.”) and her grandmother who lives in their attic, dropping one shoe, but not the other. This book is like that waiting, for the other shoe to drop. When it does, you are startled, pulled into the life of the adult Zoe who is now married and the mother of two daughters, to whom she must impart the family secrets of who she is, so they will know who they are.

The book ends in a circle, as it began, “I am Zoe Handke. I am taller than my mother. . . .”

Marvelous, marvelous work. If you love literature, writing so wonderful it makes you catch your breath, read Zoë Handke.

Carleton graduate risks, wins with prose
By Wayne Carver

Four years ago Eric Larsen’s first novel, “An American Memory,” won the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland prize. At its conclusion, Malcolm Reiner has survived his childhood in West Tree, Minn., and is married to Zoë Handke in New York City. This second novel is Zoë’s story from her childhood in Three Islands, Ill., and her college years in West Tree to her life (briefly and profoundly glimpsed) with Malcolm and their two daughters in the big city. Two ravaged but repaired people, refusing to be victims, come together in a happy ending that is a beginning again of the same story. But, “Look!” they can both exclaim, “We have come through.”

“I Am Zoë Handke,” then, is not a sequel to the first novel. It is a concurrence and a convergence. Together they form a V and constitute a fictional experience that toughly affirms life in a way we don’t see much of any more. Emerging from pasts that we are fond of saying should have destroyed them, Malcolm and Zoë have achieved a far more difficult state than love. They possess their own and each other’s stories. And in their silent understanding, they are made whole and glad. Now the stories can begin again. The last paragraph in Zoë’s story begins almost the way the first paragraph does: “I am taller than my mother.” But not quite. At the end of her telling, Zoë can put first what she could not put at the beginning: “I am Zoë Handke.” Indeed she is. There is certainty there, and just a touch of defiance.

Larsen writes with an almost aggressive disdain for the wisdom of the ages as purveyed by textbooks and creative-writing teachers: Show, don’t tell. And kill the adjectives and adverbs. Larsen’s intensely imagistic style evokes much. But he’s not afraid to tell a lot. He writes with all his power. It is good to read—again—a writer of verbal resources unafraid to use them. No coy hints. No subtle and superior nudges. No winking secrets in the minimalist way. We used to say of certain stories, “That one’s written.” Larsen writes his stories. He sometimes overwrites them. But that is for another time and place.

But though thoroughly and beautifully written, Zoë’s story cannot really be retold apart from Larsen’s way of telling. That way is to reconstruct points and places in time with vignettes, images and recurrent images, narration, and commentary as Zoë, nearly 40, remembers and reflects.

“I was born into my mother’s madness,” she says. “. . .born into the midst of her own youth.” Her mother was 19. “We could have been sisters.” The father leaves them in Three Islands to work at Pearl Harbor during World War II. He is never really in the story, even after he returns. The madness begins as a taint in the atmosphere and develops to emotional and physical abuses: she pulls Zoë’s hair and scratches her face. She tears Zoë’s clothes to pieces. She lies grisly, malignant lies. She resents her marriage, husband, mother, brothers, son, daughter. The rages explode.

“From the desk in my room she took my notebooks and papers, books, carried them downstairs and plunged them into the wastebasket under the sink before collapsing at the table in sobs. I remember my father going into the room, my mother telling him. . .that she never wanted to see her again. . . . My mother was doomed. Therefore I am doomed with her. . . .I was a mirror. My mother wanted me broken.

In 1959 Zoë goes to Minnesota to attend the College of West Tree. (Eric Larsen was born in Northfield and graduated from Carleton College in 1963.) At college she finds, in the past she studies and that the buildings represent, how the “inexplicably divergent and unrelated materials” of her life come together in sharp, unsettling, transforming moments. Those materials are the images bombarding her from her turbulent family life, her loving visits to Aunt Leonora down river, and the sense in Ambrose, Mo., in her grandfather’s house, of “the presence of time. . .moving, continuously flowing. . . . its steady and reassuring presence. . . sustaining and ambient in the air I breathed.”

The evocative power of these images cannot be got at second-hand. But in the empty, musty old humanities building of her college, lines from “Hamlet” and “Great Expectations” streaming toward her, Zoë’s voyage of discovery reaches its fulfillment. No anger. No blame. No victims. No villains. “I received the nurturing and storied air . . as it found its way into my flesh. It became dissolved into the secret, living stream of my blood.”

“I Am Zoë Handke” is a wise, tough-minded, beautiful book, written in a prose that is not afraid to take great risks.

But its mighty theme requires risk. It celebrates that miracle by which children survive and triumph over what their parents do to them. Getting to that miracle hurts. In many ways, it should not occur at all. But it does. It’s all very wonderful, when you stop to think about it. It is the beauty of Eric Larsen’s two novels that they compel us to stop and, all amazed, do just that.

At the Mercy of a Madwoman
By Diana Postlethwaite

The narrator of Jane Smiley’s recent novel, “A Thousand Acres,” confronted with repressed memories of childhood horrors, must undertake the dangerous task of “remembering what [she] can’t imagine.” Although she is unable to forgive her abusive father, this daughter’s victory comes when she is able to “imagine what he probably chose never to remember.” Like Ms. Smiley, Eric Larsen sets his fiction in a heartland filled with heartache, in a climate where the emotional windchill can be fatal. And, like “A Thousand Acres,” “I Am Zoë Handke” takes as its subject a daughter’s struggle to remember the unimaginable, to imagine the forgotten.

Zoë, who grew up south of Chicago in the railroad town of Three Islands, Ill., is the wife of Malcolm Reiner, the hero of Mr. Larsen’s previous novel, “An American Memory.” Zoë and Malcolm met at school in the small college town of West Tree, Minn., where Malcolm grew up and where much of “An American Memory” is set. The town is revisited in “I Am Zoë Handke” when Zoë battles with madness during her freshman year at the College of West Tree. These Midwestern refugees look back at their childhood traumas from their present lives with their young daughters in the Manhattan of the 1980’s.

Although they can be read independently, Mr. Larsen’s two books stand in symmetrical relationship to each other. Malcolm’s first-person narrative in “An American Memory” is a son’s reimagining of the “madness, loss and the unappeasable and impossible rage” that drove his “unrelenting father.” His wife, Zoë, “born into [her] mother’s madness,” must make sense as an adult of a childhood at the mercy of a woman “deeply filled with anger and rage. . .carrying despair within the very chambers of her heart.”

In “An American Memory,” Malcolm’s father’s insanity manifests itself in “a distractingly excessive control,” an obsessive need “to capture the desirable elements of the mute, poised and unmolested world.” Appropriately, photography—“the governing and dominant irony of the moribund”—is his hobby. Zoë’s mother, flashing uncontrollably and unpredictably into irrational sexuality and violence, is the temperamental antithesis of Malcolm’s father. Her body is her medium, suicide her art form. “My mother’s death did not end,” the adult Zoë tells us, in chillingly beautiful prose. “Beginning far in the stopped past, it grew with a greedy, unnerving, crafted and painstaking slowness; at last occurred; and then continued, still feasting on the dead flesh of time.”

Lying in her bed at night as a child, Zoë is trapped, suspended between her unloving grandmother, asleep in the attic above her, and her frightening mother in the room below. But years later, in her imaginative recreation of the past, Zoë is freed in time and space: “Somewhere before my own birth, I knew that time had existed in rooms, in spacious and splendid chambers: from these abandoned rooms, now sealed, locked, airless and depleted, I struggled blindly to draw breath into my own being.” Throughout “I Am Zoë Handke,” Zoë roams the chambers of her family’s collective history, finding and defining her place in the continuing story. Her psychic survival comes from a redemptive, retrospective reordering of the past.

The formal qualities of Eric Larsen’s art mirror his subject matter. He writes with controlling precision about the most destructive and terrifying childhood emotions: abandonment and loss. Mr. Larsen’s style is remarkable for its density and elegance, the protean intricacy of its richly recurring metaphors: windows become mirrors; water, blood; silence, sound. The inspiration of a haunting prairie breeze blows through his narrative, “the presence of time itself, moving, continuously flowing, unending.”

Mr. Larsen’s highly mannered language unreels in cadences that would make Henry James proud. The more turbulent the emotions, the more precise the prose. Indeed, at the novel’s climax, as Zoë kneels suicidally in an open window, Mr. Larsen contains the “racking, shuddering, ungovernable convulsions” of his heroine’s body within the stylistic tour de force of a 355-word sentence. Reading “I Am Zoë Handke” is often like viewing a series of exquisitely beautiful paintings of subjects in excruciating pain. This is not fiction for the faint of heart.

In the course of the novel, Zoë is relentlessly drawn “by a voiceless siren call in my own frightened and responding blood” to replicate her mother’s fate. The words “I am Zoë Handke,” which begin the book’s final paragraph, are a daughter’s cry of self-defining survival: I am not you, mother; I will live. But the statement “I am Zoë Handke” has a second meaning: these, after all, are Eric Larsen’s words, too.

Despite the sexual differences of their narrators, there’s a fundamental sameness of voice in “I Am Zoë Handke” and “An American Memory.” In each book, the novelist himself is both mother and daughter, father and son. Like those pastoral photographs of the 1930’s that were taken by Malcolm’s father, Mr. Larsen’s fiction is obsessive in its need to impose order by framing time. Like Zoë’s mother, the artist is always vulnerable to the emotional undertow that defeats not only art but life.