Reviews

BOOK REVIEWS

A Year and a Day by Leslie Pietrzyk (William Morrow; $23.95)
On-line interview with Leslie Pietrzyk for Washingtonian Book Club

In movies of the 1930s and ’40s, calendar pages flip by to show the passage of time—shorthand for the stuff we don’t need to see, the mundane between weddings and crises, romance and crimes. In Alexandria writer Leslie Pietrzyk’s second novel, the pages go by, but at the speed of life. Each chapter represents a month in the year following the suicide of 15-year-old Alice’s mother in Shelby, Iowa, in 1975. These calendar pages are the story.

Alice and her older brother, Will, are left orphaned with their mother’s scattered Aunt Aggy. (Are you still an orphan when you may have a father but don’t know who or where he is?) Will—the “perfect brother” and high-school baseball star—disappears to Boston during the World Series, then returns, more distant. Alice loses her virginity to his sexy but slippery buddy and befriends one of the town’s bad girls, who turns out to be not so bad. All the while, Alice hears her dead mother’s voice. They have frequent chats amid the events of the novel.

Naturally, Alice wants answers. She finds in her mother’s drawer “a tangle of silk scarves, sunglasses with a scratch across one lens, a Timex wristwatch . . . . No piece of paper that started out, ‘Here’s why I killed myself.’ Nothing that was the thing we were looking for—without any of us actually saying we were looking for it, without us knowing exactly what it was.”

Pietrzyk is extraordinarily skilled at duplicating the sight and sound of life’s details—“the ch-ch-ch of Mama’s knife chopping celery and onions; the ping of cranberries dropping into the colander to be rinsed.” She’s equally good at exploring the heart’s rippled waters, often finding in them the clarity of insight: “But some things were hard to say,” Alice notes, “which must be why people chose silence, not understanding that silence turned out to be harder in the end.”

The book’s serious subject matter is offset by Alice’s wry sense of humor. “Don’t worry,” her mother reassures her in their first postdeath conversation. “You’re not crazy.” Alice thinks: “Like hearing her say that would make me feel less worried or less crazy.”

In death, her mother’s words frustrate Alice the teenager, but they offer deeper meaning for the young adult: “The simple truth is,” she tells Alice, “not every choice gets the luxury of being exactly right or wrong.”

This precisely observed and quietly moving novel makes such ambiguity feel luxurious.

—WILLIAM O’SULLIVAN

April 2004

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Shenandoah
The Washington and Lee University Review
Volume 54 Number 1
Spring/Summer 2004
by Margaret Renkl

A Year and a Day by Leslie Pietrzyk (William Morrow, 2004)

By the time my father died, I'd long since pursued a profession, gotten married, borne three children. I lived in a different town, in a different state; I no longer shared his politics, his religious beliefs or his definition of virtually every intangible —success, justice, beauty. I was an adult, and when the time came for him to die, I was capable of helping him die. But for all my independence, for all the intensity of the new family bonds my husband and I had forged together, at 41 I still thought of my father's love, of his unshakable belief in me, as the surest protection against my own inconsequence. When I was growing up, he habitually told me, "No matter what happens, you can come home. Even if you marry a bastard, you can always leave him and come on home." At the moment my father's chest fell and did not rise again, that home ceased to exist.

In her second novel, A Year And a Day, Leslie Pietrzyk exactly captures the feelings of abandonment, grief and wrath that inevitably attend the loss of a parent. Pietrzyk's story is about Alice, a fatherless teenaged girl whose 36-year-old mother Annette commits suicide by parking on the railroad tracks. Pietrzyk is wise about grief. She understands its universal position, how it reduces us all to fearful children — shaken, powerless, mindful of our own essential smallness — even as it is the one event that forces us to assume the mantle of adulthood.

To be sure, Pietrzyk gets some things wrong in this book, and her chief misstep is the decision to make the voice of Alice's dead mother the central plot device for revelation. These are not remembered conversations reinterpreted in the light of new understanding, nor imagined ones designed to keep a loved one's memory relevant to a world she no longer inhabits, but genuine present-tense chats in which Annette imparts cooking pointers and make-up tips ("Nothing ruins a good impression faster than lipstick smears on your teeth"), expresses alarm at her daughter's driving ("'Alice,' Mama shrieked. 'A red light means stop even if no one's there.'") and reveals family secrets she steadfastly refused to discuss in life. "Mama never told me any of this when she was alive," Alice says, lest we suspect these apparitions of being grief-induced hallucinations. Besides hitting a wrong note in a book that has no other magical-realist elements, this contrivance undercuts the emotional crux of Pietrzyk's story: how can a teen-aged daughter sincerely grieve the loss other mother if Mama keeps reappearing to perform all the motherly functions she engaged in before she died? The disembodied parent is in many ways preferable to one with the power to take away the car keys. More importantly, the hardest part about parental death is that the parent is no longer around to offer comfort when occasions for grieving arise. Alice, unlike the rest of us, has her mother to talk to whenever she feels particularly motherless.

And yet it’s impossible to fault this problematic feature too thoroughly. For one thing, in a deeply poetic book that's refreshingly shot through with humor, it allows some of the funniest lines: after Alice surrenders her virginity in the graveyard where her mother is buried, Annette is stern and scolding: "You’ve done something you can't ever undo. Did you think of that?" Alice observes, "Anyone would have to admit that was pretty fucking funny coming from her."

Besides, Pietrzyk is exactly right that even the frequent presence of a loved one's voice cannot make up for every other absence Describing a disappointing encounter with a radio personality whose show about homemaking tips is the closest thing she has to a surrogate mother, Alice says, “I’d been sure Dotty King would have the kind of hands that push your hair off your hot forehead when you’re sick…but her icy hand wasn’t like that at all. Later, a glimpse of a troubled classmate turning to her mother in anguish resonates with Alice: "Mrs. Elam rested her arm across Paula's shoulders, gave her a tight, never-let-you go squeeze that made me like Mrs. Elam so much I thought my heart would explode. "Voices and memories go only so far when what you crave is to be held.

Pietrzyk also understands the greatest irony of the universal human heart: The most common emotions always feel unique. "[Death is] the most fair thing there is because we all die "Alice’s biology teacher explains. Grief .is the one feeling anyone who loves is guaranteed. But despite its ubiquity it is the most isolating of intense emotions, erecting a barrier that others recognize instantly but can never breach. “We’re totally alone now, aren’t we?” Alice asks her brother Will, and there’s no contradiction between that plural pronoun and her sense of disconnection. “The words were minuscule for what I felt, with the sky darkening above us, the useless dust under our feet…[O]ur mother gone, my brother maybe going, and no words beyond ‘sad’ or ‘lonely’ to express what I was thinking—and no one to say them to anyway." Singular Alice, alone in her suffering, suffers exactly as we all do, no matter our age or the circumstances of our bereavement.

The oldest trope in juvenile literature is the resourceful child—Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel—who somehow manages to emerge stronger, wiser and more nicely situated than she might have done under her mother's care. In fairy tales, having your parents drop dead is the ultimate sink-or-swim act of empowerment, but Leslie Pietrzyk does something more interesting and far truer, with A Year and A Day: She shows how, in undeniable though perhaps subtle ways, even the most resourceful of us never really grow up. What Alice learns is not what the Brothers Grimm knew but rather what Wordsworth did: the child is mother to the woman. There are losses we never really recover from but still we go on.
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— Margaret Renkl