What We Keep
By Elizabeth Berg
Random House, 272 pages, $23
Ginny Young is on an airplane at sunrise, wishing to undo the laws of physics so the plane can stop above the clouds to allow passengers to wander about and enjoy the perspective: “How proud we would suddenly feel about where we live, how tender toward everything that’s ours.” Elizabeth Berg’s sixth novel, “What We Keep,” is about perspective.
Ginny is flying from Boston to San Francisco to see her mother for the first time in 35 years. When she was not yet a teen, Ginny, her sister, Sharla, and her mother, Marion, made some decisions and assumptions they’ve lived with ever since. Now Sharla has phoned to say she’s worried about a test for ovarian cancer, so the three women are getting together to reconcile.
The essence of the story, told in flashbacks, is excruciatingly believable. Things fell apart the summer that Ginny was 12. She and Sharla hear their parents arguing, hear their mother say she’d never wanted children, that being a wife and mother isn’t enough.
A woman who recently moved in next door lives self-indulgently and apparently independently. The sisters adore her but assume she is a catalyst for their mother’s discontent.
Having made the decision to leave the family, at least contingently, Marion flounders. She can’t talk to her daughters; they won’t talk to her. Ginny thinks about the “contempt you always have for someone you see is not in control when you want them to be.”
Berg is very good, as always, at reconstructing the emotional and conversational rhythms of girls on the edge of adolescence. She is usually good, too, at depicting characters with impressive resilience, but in “What We Keep” Ginny and Sharla lack that quality. They’ve grown older than their mother was when she left them and still can’t understand that back in 1958, Marion saw coming a lifetime of Tupperware parties and chose instead to try to exercise her considerable artistic talents.
No matter what we say about forgiveness, we don’t forget perceived rejection. But the hardening of Ginny’s and Sharla’s girlish attitudes doesn’t make sense. Take away that rigidity, however, and there is no story, just a series of poignant episodes. Similarly puzzling is Marion’s inability to make contact with her children as her initial confusion waned and her self-esteem grew.
Ginny, who begins her story aboard a plane above clouds pinked by the rising sun, closes it watching the sun set on her return trip, knowing that each morning brings “the rising up again of what once seemed lost.”