CONSCIENCE

While exploring the deeply flawed yet enduring marriage of two Vietnam War–era activists now leading comfortable bourgeois lives in New Haven, Connecticut, Mattison (Nothing is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn, 2008, etc.) also tackles broader issues, including the value of risk versus caution in the name of idealism.

After falling in love as zealous student anti-war protestors, editor and literary biographer Olive—who's white and an “intermittently and selectively observant” Jew—married African-American school principal Griff, a nonpracticing Christian. Their long marriage was interrupted by several years of separation, and while their relationship has more or less recovered, Olive chafes at Griff’s irritating presence while resenting his frequent absence. Now a new marital crisis arises when Olive is assigned to write an essay concerning a novel written years earlier by her sort-of friend Val, a bestseller Val openly based on a romanticized version of the life of Olive’s close friend Helen, whose radicalism led to violent tragedy. Meanwhile, Griff is elected president of the board of a local community service center and finds himself in conflict with Jean, who runs the center. Risk-averse Griff considers Jean too “casual about trouble” while she considers him “controlling” and overcautious—and both are right. Then Jean, with whom Olive has forged a friendship, reads Val’s novel, which Griff has long avoided finishing, and notices Griff’s resemblance to a late-appearing character who influences the Helen character’s decisions. Ironically, Olive considers Griff’s self-blame for the real harm he may or may not have caused an overweening intrusion into her grief over Helen. Olive and Griff’s struggles as youthful activists balancing the limits of liberalism against the excesses of radicalism as a cure for social ills interlace with Olive's and Jean’s current efforts to define themselves emotionally within an ethical context (Griff having done so long ago). Not to mention the question they raise about whether fiction must be accurate.

Not easy but rewarding and certainly timely; Mattison’s complex prose matches the multidimensional moral arguments raging inside her prickly, multidimensional characters.