By Laura Collins-Hughes GLOBE CORRESPONDENT JUNE 17, 2016
They are deep into summer on Martha’s Vineyard, their pale skin browned by the sun and salt-dusted by the sea, when the news arrives. “There’s no more money,” the family lawyer tells Fern, who has floated along all her life in a pool of wealth so comfortable that she never even bothered to acquire a college education — just got married at 18 to Edgar, a socially suitable Yalie, and meandered on from there, having first a daughter and then twin sons: a cosseted little tribe of five.
Now Edgar, who is 32 and has spent the last decade channeling his toxic resentment of privilege into the writing of a novel called “Lucky,” might actually have to get a job. He and Fern, who is 28, probably should sell the Vineyard house. As for their year-round home, the six-bedroom Cambridge colonial that Edgar’s mom bought them, they may need to downsize.
Poor darlings. Can you even imagine?
Ramona Ausubel’s “Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty” opens in 1976, the bicentennial; it might have been titled “The Pursuit of Happiness.” On the one hand, it’s kind of a relief that the money from Fern’s side of the family, made long ago on the backs of slaves, is gone, her father having stealthily given it away before his recent death. On the other hand, the easiest way for Edgar to save his family would be to work for his father’s company, making money off the toil of poorly paid men in dangerous mines — an idea he cannot bear.
“I never wanted you to have to do something you hate,” Fern tells him.
“Clearly money will find me and trap me no matter what I do,” he replies, and you’re almost obligated to loathe him for his sulky brattiness and lack of initiative. Even when he upends his life by having an affair, the woman he cheats with makes the first move.
Much of this novel is entertaining, and it’s occasionally deeply insightful, particularly about the limitations on the lives of girls and women in mid-20th-century America. Fern’s mother, a sculptor named Evelyn, felt relief in the delivery room when her first baby turned out to be a boy — and a kind of dread a moment later when that child’s twin did not. “In the girl’s scrunched face Evelyn saw the entire path: pigtails, dollhouse, riding lessons, foxtrot, engagement, white dress, all in service of the repetition of this very same moment. Another perfectly wasted life.”
Fern, the twin in question, would beg to differ. She finds pleasure and meaning in the life she’s made — in the life we see her make, as the book flashes back to earlier times — with Edgar and their children. Exhausting though it is, she’s proud of being an attentive mother to Cricket and the boys, Will and James.
This is why it may drive you a little bit up the wall when Fern suddenly takes off on a cross-country road trip with a man she’s barely met. True, she has just discovered Edgar’s affair, so she’s furious and out of sorts, but she’s also told him not to come home. She has zero reason to assume that he will be there to take care of their 9-year-old daughter and 6-year-old sons.
“Every tenth word out of her mouth for nine years had been one of caution. It was as if she had not completely let her breath out since Cricket was born.” No way would she blithely abandon them — and no way would the children, with doting grandparents a phone call away, keep mum about being on their own. It feels very much like a puppet master is pulling these strings.
Ausubel, author of the novel “No One Is Here Except All of Us” and the story collection “A Guide to Being Born,” has a penchant for interspersing the fabulistic with the realistic, which is no doubt why the man Fern runs off with is a giant. The novel is, after all, partly about matters of scale — about scarcity and overabundance, about searching for the sweet spot of enough.
So Fern’s adventure and the children’s survivalist challenge are probably meant to be surreal, but they don’t come across that way. There’s no world-of-the-story logic to these pieces of the novel, so they just feel like realism badly done. For maddeningly long stretches, “Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty” gets under your skin in ways it doesn’t intend.
Yet this novel has its charms, including Ausubel’s giant — a kind and sensible man who’s always had to struggle, one way or another.
“Life is effortful,’’ he says to Fern. “That’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s good to have work to do.”