Wavemaker II
By Mary-Beth Hughes
Atlantic Monthly Press, $24
ISBN 0871138352

Buy or borrow this book! Support your local independent bookseller Find it in a WorldCat library Compare prices at major online bookstores

Send this review to a friend

A debut with a deft slice of history

I never start reading a piece of fiction grounded in history without some cynicism. It takes a deft and sensitive writer to fill out the reality of such a story without being hobbled by the trueness of the characters and circumstances. Too often, these narratives become either a jumble of facts inelegantly cemented or an over-sentimentalized rant that betrays the author's personal and peculiar obsession. In Wavemaker II, Mary-Beth Hughes has proven how well an author can transcend the pitfalls of writing fiction based in truth.

The story concerns the Clemens family: husband Will is in prison because of his refusal to testify against the real-life figure Roy Cohn, a controversial McCarthy-era lawyer, while his wife, Kay, tries to care for a son, Bo, languishing with cancer, and a daughter, Lou-Lou, coping with an awkward coming-of-age. The story begins in the summer of 1964 with a visit from Will, escorted to his posh New Jersey home from prison by federal marshals, and arcs forcefully through the trials of Kay, Lou-Lou, Bo, Roy Cohn and his loved ones, as a time of tension and uncertainty envelopes all involved. There's a near documentary realism to the passage of time, to the incorporation of sensory details and moments that the characters involved hardly notice. For example, while her son is hospitalized, Kay teeters around New York City, stumbling from cigarette to cigarette, leaving her hotel scrambled eggs to turn cold for days at a time without letting the maid clean her room. But the reader notices the grainy detail of the hospital, Kay's clothes and mannerisms, the way she moves and interacts in her near-stupor. Hughes casts us, throughout, in the role of benevolent observer, and our empathy almost seems to push these troubled folks toward Wavemaker II's sigh of an ending.

This novel evokes what a factual account of a life cannot bring us -- the true beauty of human conflict, its tensions and releases, sensory assaults and pleasures, and the unconscious awkwardness and grace of it. For Mary-Beth Hughes, this is a truly impressive debut.

Sarah Goodrum writes from Nashville.