For better or worse, readers of a certain age will always have a hard time separating Nell Freudenberger from the unseemly riot of envy that surrounded her sudden accession to literary stardom in 2001. Complete with Harvard education, debut story in the New Yorker, and illustrated profile in Vogue, Freudenberger seemed engineered by some capricious deity specifically to generate gales of resentment—a phenomenon captured brilliantly by Curtis Sittenfeld in a 2003 essay for Salon, itself a master class in the passive-aggressive dismantling of reputation. The collection that followed, Lucky Girls, was in turn succeeded by two novels, The Dissident (2006) and The Newlyweds (2012), with all three books receiving enthusiastic but not rapturous acclaim.
The reason I bring up all this backstory is that Freudenberger’s latest novel, Lost and Wanted, seems in fundamental ways to have been transported from the early aughts to what is, in 2019, a very different kind of moment, one that demands a very different kind of fiction. Lost and Wanted has many strengths — it is, among other things, extraordinarily acute and often moving about the relation between parents and young children — but the end impression is of an artifact polished to a high sheen and then recently air-dropped from some other, less frantic, parallel universe. To dismiss it as irrelevant seems somehow both cruel and entirely apt.
The protagonist of Lost and Wanted is Helen Clapp, renowned physicist, MIT professor, author of a best-selling book of popular science, and single mother by choice of eight-year-old Jake. The precipitating event of the novel’s plotis the sudden death, by illness, of Helen’s long-lost college friend Charlie, a charismatic black woman who gave up a promising academic future in favor of a life in California as a hotshot TV producer. As the novel begins, Helen is receiving cryptic messages on her cell phone from her dead friend. Could it be a ghost? (One of the book’s more satisfying motifs is the way the eerieness of receiving messages from the dead is played off against Helen’s bone-dry rational skepticism.)
Helen Clapp is an interesting protagonist. One of the admirable things about this book is that Freudenberger has for her narrator a woman who is not just intelligent and loving but also hyperlogical, competitive, even prickly. On the theoretical level, a level-headed female scientist narrator prone to digressions on the intricacies of astrophysics seems fair and good — we certainly have had to listen to a lot of tedious minutiae from enthusiastic male narrators over the years. In practical terms, though, I confess I found myself skimming passages like these:
“If he could get the money, he wanted to set up two of these rotors — the technical term was ‘dynamic field generators,’ or DFGs — one on either side of the laser. These would be rotating machines of extremely dense metal, like small windmills. They would be out of phase with each other, and would accordingly cancel out each other’s influence on the laser inside the interferometers.”
There is a lot of this. Is Helen meant to be insufferably pedantic? Perhaps; but I suspect that despite her famously steely control Freudenberger, whose previous fiction also feels at times overdetermined, is unwilling to abandon information culled from painstaking research, with the result that her material gets away from her at times.
Scientific lucubrations aside, there is something weirdly disconnected about the lives in Lost and Wanted and its tentative love triangle. There is a brief, nonspecific allusion to the election of 2016 (“you can’t be like this for four years,” Helen’s young son tells her, regarding her tendency to scold the news), and a subplot about a predatory mentor that feels half-hearted, but on the whole the book seems to take place in a vacuum. (I was startled when an allusion to REM’s album Automatic for the People dropped from seemingly out of nowhere during one of the flashbacks, letting me know that we were now in 1992.) Regarding her friendship with Charlie, Helen meditates thus:
“Maybe today black girls and brown girls and white girls, lesbians and bisexual and trans people sit in their dorm rooms talking about privilege and adjacency and intersectionality. It’s just that it wasn’t like that then.”
She continues:
“Charlie was black, I was white. When that last binary came up, we dismissed it with a kind of eye roll. It was uncool, sort of embarrassing and outdated, to make a big deal about it.”
This is unquestionably historically accurate, but it also feels thin and defensive and dangerously close to I don’t see color, especially since there is not a glimmer of irony to suggest that Helen’s perspective is meant to be flawed or a source of dramatic tension.
I feel crummy and tentative writing this, grimly eyeing my inner compass for signs of a double standard. Surely we should allow Freudenberger the same latitude we would some literary he-man swaggering across the veldt of Park Slope, his brow furrowed with self-absorbed Great Thoughts, his maw always greedily gorging on the great Raw Material of Life? Is only Karl Ove allowed to write in excruciating detail about the details of preparing a child’s lunch? Well, no; but even more troubling is the way Lost and Wanted continues Freudenberger’s tendency to inhabit the skins, and minds, of people of color. The voicing of borrowed identity lands differently on the mind’s ear than it once did. The various Indian men in Lucky Girls, the Asian artist in The Dissident, the Bangladeshi bride of The Newlyweds, and now Charlie … Didn’t anyone bother to tell Nell Freudenberger that in 2019 this kind of ventriloquism is considered a bit suspect?
I keep flipping through the dog-eared pages of my advance copy in search of things to admire, but instead just finding more reasons to feel sour and pissy. Is it shallow of me to snicker when we are told that Charlie’s widower husband runs a business specializing in vintage surf gear? Is it really possible for someone to be, as Charlie is, an expert in Cixous and Kristeva and a successful Hollywood producer? Is it not somewhat tone-deaf, during a time that increasingly feels like a desperate, society-wide game of musical chairs, to so blithely equip your characters with summer homes and trips to Europe and gourmet takeout? How can you write a three-hundred-page lyrical naturalist literary novel set partly in the present and not once mention Donald Trump?
These are nasty, probably unanswerable questions, quite possibly above my pay grade; conceivably above even Nell Freudenberger’s. Maybe nothing really has changed, though. Maybe in Nell Freudenberger’s universe it is eternally the pre-lapsarian summer of 2001, except with better computers, and the rest of us are dreaming this black dream. Now that would be astrophysics I’d pay attention to.
[Published by Knopf, April 2, 2019. 336 pages, $26.95 hardcover.]
I have scrolled through all of the reviews I could find of this book, and this is the first I found that mentioned the issue of white folk “ventriloquizing” people of color. Being a divorced white parent of two living off the fringes of academia, I found this book easy to finish in two sittings. It reminded me of my own 1970s college life, in which I (manually) typed papers for a Pakistani astrophysicist, fell in love with a Punjabi-American poet who became noted as a mycologist, and had a black RA who had a mysterious ailment and a heroin-addict brother. I mention this only to say that I would not feel capable of writing the story from the point of view of any of these other people. Freudenberger comes close to pulling it off, but I wonder what people of color think of it.