Secrets feed on time in the masterful novel ‘Mothers and Sons’

Dreary do-gooders. A mother who runs a women’s retreat center in Vermont; a 40-year-old son who represents asylum seekers and lives alone in a studio apartment in Brooklyn where the air is redolent of depression and earnestness.

These are not the kind of fictional characters I’d ordinarily want to usher the new year in with; but Adam Haslett gives me little choice. His latest novel, Mothers and Sons, is too beautifully written to pass over; too smart about how secrets feed on time, perversely taking up more room in our lives as the years go by.

We first meet Peter Fischer, the adult lawyer son, in the midst of one of his overwhelming work days. His job, as Peter ruefully sees it, is to force his clients — people who’ve experienced violence in other countries — to “go over and over the worst thing that ever happened to them … “

Peter then shapes their harrowing and often convoluted stories into a narrative that will, hopefully, persuade a judge to grant them asylum. A gay man, Peter limits himself to sporadic hookups that don’t interfere with his work, work, work. Occasionally, Peter finds himself thinking back to a question he was asked by an older lawyer at his long ago job interview:

What if in the big picture you aren’t actually helping? What if you’re a bureaucrat in an endless moral disaster, but if you walk away the disaster will be a tiny bit worse? Will you still do it?

Peter didn’t know then — and doesn’t know now — what the value of his work is in the big picture of things. That is, until a new client — a 21-year-old gay Albanian man seeking asylum on the grounds of his sexual orientation — pushes Peter into a crisis. While meeting with him, Peter feels a sudden “deep fatigue … strong as a potion.”

Peter subsequently locks himself out of his apartment, twice, and experiences vertigo. A memory is forcing its way to the surface that impels Peter to contact his mother, Ann. She’s the woman who runs that retreat center. Ann and Peter have been quietly distanced for decades ever since she left Peter’s father for her current partner, a woman. But, as it turns out, the estrangement between this mother and son is rooted in something much more devastating.

I fear I’m flattening Mothers and Sons into a melodrama, when, instead, it’s Haslett’s appreciation of the all-too-human mess of life that makes his writing so arresting; his characters and storylines so authentic. Midway through the novel, Haslett bends the narrative back in time to Peter’s adolescence, an era when “coming out” felt riskier, especially to Peter himself. Remembering the night he first had sex with another man — an indifferent stranger — the adult Peter thinks to himself: “How full of shame it is to be lonely.” Haslett scatters such sentences throughout this novel; sentences that can make you stop and go down emotional rabbit holes of your own.

Another one of Haslett’s triumphs here is the way he makes the work his two main characters do so engrossing. Both Peter and Ann — who’s a former priest turned lay counselor — are engaged in the hard work of listening: Here are samplings of Ann’s thoughts during an extended scene where she and two of her co-workers listen to a hospital chaplain describe how burned out she is:

It was in these moments, after a person finished her first unburdening of why she had sought out the center … that the urge to soothe came most strongly to Ann. … But to speak immediately would be to glide over the heaviness in the room. In this case [a story about] the passage of time and the aging of a vocation. . . . People barely had room to grieve the loss of others, let alone pieces of themselves. And yet, unmourned, such fragments were bound to haunt.”

Mothers and Sons is an intricate, compelling novel about the power of stories and, especially, about the need to let go of those stories that keep people stuck. Maybe, in that sense, it’s a fitting novel for the new year after all.