“The Laments: A Novel”
by George Hagen
Published: July 2005
ISBN: 081297218X

(Updated: December 27, 2006.)

From the Publisher…

Meet the Laments—the affably dysfunctional globetrotting family at the center of George Hagen’s exuberant debut novel.

Howard is an engineer who dreams of irrigating the Sahara and lives by the motto “Laments move!” His wife Julia is a fiery spirit who must balance her husband’s oddly peripatetic nature with unexpected aspirations of her own. And Will is the “waif with a paper-thin heart” who is given to Howard and Julia in return for their own child who has been lost in a bizarre maternity ward mishap. As Will makes his way from infancy to manhood in a family that careens from continent to continent, one wonders where the Laments will ever belong.

In Bahrain, Howard takes a job with an oil company and young Will makes his first friend. But in short order he is wrenched off to another land, his mother’s complicated friendship with the American siren Trixie Howitzer causing the family to bolt. In Northern Rhodesia, during its last days as a white colony, the twin enfants terribles Marcus and Julius are born, and Will falls for the gardener’s daughter, a girl so vain that she admires her image in the lid of a biscuit tin. But soon the family’s life is upturned again, thie time by their neighbor Major Buck Quinn, with his suburban tirades against black self-rule. Envisioning a more civilized life on “the sceptered isle,” the Laments board an ocean liner bound for England. Alas, poor Will is greeted by the tribal ferocity of his schoolmates and a society fixated on the Blitz. No sooner has he succumbed to British pop culture in the guise of mop-top Sally Byrd and her stacks of 45s, than the Laments uproot themselves once again, and it’s off to New Jersey, where life deals crisis and opportunity in equal measure.

Undeniably eccentric, the Laments are also universal. Every family moves on in life. Children grow up, things are left behind; there is always something to lament. Through the Lament’s restlessness, responses to adversity, and especially their unwieldy love for one another, George Hagen gives us a portrait of every family that is funny, tragic, and improbably true.

I re-read some of the reviews of this book after having finished it. What struck me was how very different things struck the various reviewers. It felt somehow that things that might very well be personal laments were what resonated and so “stuck”. In that light, here are mine…

I guess I am not a fan of “laments”. We all have them. Whether we make a life or a story out of them is a different matter. And I guess I choose to think that I don’t. Or I choose to think that I turn them into a different sort of life or story. Same thing either way. And, this novel is rather lament-full.

The circumstances of this story, although packaged in a way of George Hagen’s choosing, are likely familiar in some form or other to all of us. The telling of the unfolding of the consequences of some very human decisions and choices was what? Reassuring maybe in the resonance or recognition of the “truths” of them. And I suppose these characters were doing the best they could. And I wished that they would have done better. My lament, my impatience, my recognition I suppose.

An interesting read rating a three out of five hearts on my scale. At the very least, any book that can be so different, so personal for everyone is rather amazing writing.