In 'Goldengrove,' a family slowly lets go of grief

FRANCINE PROSE (STEPHANIE BERGER)

Goldengrove
By Francine Prose
Harper, 275 pp., $24.95

In a novel about a tragedy, few writers can render a sentence such as "The thought of bacon made me think there might be a reason to go on living" without it coming across as errant flippancy. Francine Prose is one of them. By the time we witness her character Nico's inkling, after her older sister has drowned, that things might taste better again someday, we are so acutely attuned to the peculiar and personal nuances of her grief that the idea of her savoring the smell of bacon is cause to rejoice.

The beginning of this captivating novel finds 13-year-old Nico lazing with her sister, Margaret, in a rowboat on Mirror Lake in upstate New York, on the shore of which they live with their ex-hippie parents, a father who owns the town bookstore and a mother who is an amateur musician and practices yoga by the lake. Listening to their mother play a Chopin waltz on the piano as they drift with their arms in the water, Nico and Margaret talk about bodies, Margaret's boyfriend, and sex, before Margaret - a "lover of everything old - films, jazz songs, vintage postcards, and clothes" - gives Nico a salute she learned from Ginger Rogers, and dives overboard. She never emerges, and when police locate the body, Nico and her parents are plunged into mourning, guilt, and the realization that "Margaret's death had shaken us, like three dice in a cup, and spilled us out with new faces in unrecognizable combinations."

As it happens, Margaret had recently been diagnosed with a mild heart condition that likely contributed to her death, and Nico faults her parents for not being more aggressive in having it treated. Because her heart hurts in the wake of losing her sister, she imagines that she has the condition, too. Her mother comes to depend on pain medication to relieve her psychic suffering, and Nico suspects that her father may be having an affair with his employee.

Feeling "alone on an iceberg split off from a glacier," Nico finds consolation only in the suggestion of her sister's boyfriend, Aaron, that spending time with each other, remembering Margaret together, might provide an antidote to the distress they both feel at the loss of her. They forge an alliance that Nico keeps secret from her parents because they hadn't wholly approved of Aaron when Margaret was dating him.

They watch "Casablanca" - one of Margaret's favorite movies - and order Margaret's preferred ice cream flavor at the Dairy Divine. It comforts Nico to be able to do these things in the company of someone who knew and loved her sister. But then Aaron presses a vial of vanilla-scented oil on Nico, telling her that it is "aromatherapy," because Margaret used it as perfume. He requests that Nico wear a particular shirt of Margaret's for one of their clandestine meetings. On some level Nico understands that Aaron is using her in an effort to resurrect his dead lover, but she doesn't mind, because she pities him and because it flatters her. And because, being 13, she doesn't know any better.

Of course, she learns to know better, after Aaron's obsession with her takes a creepy and dangerous turn, and Nico can no longer fool herself that he is not responsible for his actions because they are born of grief. She also discovers that although she has been imagining her sister as a guardian angel of sorts, she is the only one who can ultimately rescue herself.

Despite the age of its narrator, "Goldengrove" is an adult novel. Nico is intelligent, articulate, and, for the most part, emotionally sophisticated; for instance, in blaming her parents for Margaret's death because they didn't take her to a heart specialist, she imagines spitting at them, "Don't you wish you could have back your little problem of not liking Margaret's boyfriend?" When her mother floats away on pills and her father declines to acknowledge it, Nico tells us, "At those moments, I hated how grown-up I needed to be in order to keep reminding myself that they were doing their best." She is also self-aware enough to recognize her myriad conflicting emotions at realizing she is attracted to, and courting the attentions of, her dead sister's boyfriend.

Prose is the esteemed and distinguished author of 14 previous novels, including National Book Award finalist "Blue Angel." In writing about even the most serious subjects, she allows her characters to display senses of humor, as when Nico's father wants to title the book he's working on - an examination of how people in different cultures and eras view the end of the world - "Eschatology for Dummies," or when Nico's mother comes out of her medicated fog to ask a relevant question and Nico tells us, "Mom's spaceship docked momentarily on Planet Dinner Table." Prose's consistently complex and incisive narratives exhibit uncommon grace and authority, making each new publication an occasion for welcome. "Goldengrove" is no exception, offering readers the privilege of witnessing one girl's journey to womanhood through the prism of profound loss, a young soul on its way to becoming older, and wise.

Jessica Treadway, an associate professor at Emerson College, is the author of "Absent Without Leave" and "And Give You Peace."