Fault Lines

Fault Lines

Nancy Huston

I used to date this guy.  The fact that he was an absolute and total raging douchenozzle is immaterial to this story, except that I can’t think about him without wanting to punch babies.  But anyway, I used to date this guy.  All the before-the-sex stuff was amazing, but then the actual sex was, well, not long enough and also 4” too short.  The fact that the preshow was so good made the actual event even less of a show. 

This book was kind of like that.

I love love loved the beginning.  It’s a generational story, working backward from California in the mid-2000s to Germany during WWII.  The first section is told by this precocious, slightly terrifying six-year-old named Sol.  He thinks he’s the center of the universe, which is normal for a six-year-old, because his mother tells him he’s the center of the universe, which I understand has become normal for parents.  The book reminded me that kids think magically instead of rationally, not stepping on cracks or believing in crossing your fingers and holding your breath while making a wish, but the book also reminded me that the mid-2000s must have been a scary time to live in a world that operates on magical rules.  Sol wants to grow up to be George Bush (or God), wonders if heaven is like Texas, and sneaks off when his mom is busy to look at porn and pictures of Abu Ghraib. 

After Sol’s section, the book moves backward through his father, grandmother and great-grandmother, all of whom share his self-centrism and perfectionism.  As it moves back in history, the story seems to move more and more inevitably toward the big reveal, which is that his great-grandmother was kidnapped from her family as part of the Lebensborn program in Nazi Germany.  (In part, the program “reassigned” Aryan-looking children from occupied countries to high-ranking SS families). 

Ultimately, while I loved the narrative, the ending had the effect of explaining away the darkness that runs throughout the family.  They’re drawn to violence and obsessive self-control not because we all are, but because someone planted that seed in their family line.  They have an out, which feels like what we’ve all been looking for in the last decade.  I didn’t want Himmler to be the bad guy; I wanted us to admit that the bad guy is in all of us.  It’s a lot to ask from this book, and it wasn’t the point of the book, but I loved the beginning so much that I wanted more from the ending.