Family ties stretched in ‘Thanksgiving’
“Thanksgiving Night”
by Richard Bausch (HarperCollins, 416 pages, $24.95)
There’s so much to do before the holiday guests arrive: spruce up the house, buy a turkey, see the therapist.
Holiday dinners with the family can be freighted with a certain tension, as everyone comes to the table packing emotional baggage going back days, months or decades.
The day’s parlor game is waiting to see whether that baggage is sprung open or remains benignly shut, covered safely in a layer of pleasantries.
And so it is in Richard Bausch’s beautifully told new novel, “Thanksgiving Night.” The months leading up to the holiday in the lives of one extended family – reaching even to recent acquaintances who become entangled in its folds – culminate in a gathering in which the binding ties threaten to come undone.
Will Butterfield, 48, is the owner of a bookstore in a dilapidated Virginia town not far from the outskirts of Washington, on the cusp of Y2K. His marriage to his second wife, a schoolteacher – named Elizabeth, same as the first – seems solid enough, frayed only by the late-night calls from his mother, Holly Grey, and her aunt Fiona, older than her by only a few years.
The two older women share a home and irritate each other to no end; it seems they really can’t live with each other or without each other. In the process, they give Elizabeth migraines.
Will’s two 20-something children, when they visit, bicker constantly, in part over his daughter’s wish to find her mother.
Fiona and Holly make the almost accidental acquaintance of Oliver Ward, 55-year-old widowed handyman with a head-shaking tic, the result of shrapnel that hit him in Vietnam.
They also meet his police officer daughter, Alison, after a public to-do involving Holly. Alison is divorced and lonely, especially now that her best friend has moved. She’s raising her young daughter and teenage son; Oliver lives with them, and he feels he doesn’t have much to offer them.
Completing the circle is the monsignor from the Catholic church, whom everyone calls Brother Fire. He’s in his 70s and thinking of leaving the priesthood because hearing people’s confessions has taken on the act of catching up on some really good gossip, and it’s not a feeling he likes.
Early on, everyone in “Thanksgiving Night” seems to be walking a thin tightrope over a pit of despair, trying valiantly not to slip into it. Among all the extended family, with the crises of faith, identity and, most basically, survival, Will and Elizabeth face perhaps the hardest trial.
That’s not to say the novel is without levity, love and hope; Bausch supplies plenty to go around, just as one would wish on any Thanksgiving night.