Survivor

By Paul Gray

MY OLD SWEETHEART

by Susanna Moore

Houghton Mifflin; 211 pages; $12.95

Nearly halfway through this first novel the heroine makes a passing reference to Anna Karenina. Her remark is no accident, for she belongs to a family that is unhappy in ways Tolstoy would understand. Her father, Sheridan Shields, is a doctor who practices in a lush, remote area of Hawaii. He was one of the first Americans allowed into Hiroshima after the Bomb; he left the flattened city with an infant Japanese boy whom he had delivered and an incurable case of moral numbness. His wife Anna tells him that "what you saw there became your definition of suffering. And mere human, everyday suffering means nothing to you." She knows that he is sleeping with a young native girl, and this knowledge undermines her already unsteady self-confidence. She leans emotionally on her daughter Lily ("my old sweetheart"); the twelve-year-old girl must learn to inject Anna with drugs, care for her younger brother and sister and helplessly watch her family disintegrate. She must also, years later, find the strength to put the past behind her.

Author Susanna Moore, 33, tells both of these stories in alternating chapters; Lily the child is a character in the past, while Lily the grown woman narrates the flash-forwards. This method of jumping forth and back is initially disconcerting but ultimately effective. Lily coexists as daughter and mother, a survivor of a history of losses.

The idyllic Hawaiian background makes the Shields family's troubles all the more startling. Mynah birds scold in the trees; the children live in the Big House; their father is rich and respected; their mother is beautiful and indulged. Anna appears at one dance wearing a cape made from thousands of gardenias. Her children know that she is somewhat different and worship her for it: "She is not the kind who bandages cuts, Lily thought. She is not like other mothers, who make grocery lists and wear undergarments. Other mothers do not forget that you go back to school in September ..." They also suspect that she will not be with them for long: "They stared at her raptly, adoringly, as if they were memorizing her." She does, in fact, leave suddenly and mysteriously. In her absence, Sheridan installs his girlfriend in the servants' quarters. Anna finally returns, bearing scars on her temples from a treatment that, she tells Lily, "didn't work." Anna's next departure is self-induced and permanent.

Recalling all this, Lily must also face current problems. She is unmarried and has a child named Anna, in honor of her mother: "Without an Anna, I am desolate. She should not be so important. I am trying to remedy that. I am trying to improve, but I have made her my talisman: if she is happy, then I am not my mother." Her father, from whom she has been estranged for years, has disappeared from his old haunts. Rumor has it that he is in Cambodia, doing penance for past sins by treating the victims of the war in Viet Nam. Lily decides to "find him in order to let him go."

This resolve smacks of psychobabble and contemporary therapeutic bromides, but Author Moore never allows Lily's quest to fall into simplemindedness. Lily remains, in spite of herself, her mother's champion and her father's daughter, remembering that he had taught her "subtleties" about sorrow, hate and love. Her struggle mirrors a tension between children and parents that is at least as old as Genesis. Moore makes this age-old story seem young. --By Paul Gray

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