Conscience

June 1, 2018
While exploring the deeply flawed yet enduring marriage of two Vietnam War-era activists now leading comfortable bourgeois lives in New Haven, Connecticut, Mattison (Nothing is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn, 2008, etc.) also tackles broader issues, including the value of risk versus caution in the name of idealism.After falling in love as zealous student anti-war protestors, editor and literary biographer Olive--who's white and an "intermittently and selectively observant" Jew--married African-American school principal Griff, a nonpracticing Christian. Their long marriage was interrupted by several years of separation, and while their relationship has more or less recovered, Olive chafes at Griff's irritating presence while resenting his frequent absence. Now a new marital crisis arises when Olive is assigned to write an essay concerning a novel written years earlier by her sort-of friend Val, a bestseller Val openly based on a romanticized version of the life of Olive's close friend Helen, whose radicalism led to violent tragedy. Meanwhile, Griff is elected president of the board of a local community service center and finds himself in conflict with Jean, who runs the center. Risk-averse Griff considers Jean too "casual about trouble" while she considers him "controlling" and overcautious--and both are right. Then Jean, with whom Olive has forged a friendship, reads Val's novel, which Griff has long avoided finishing, and notices Griff's resemblance to a late-appearing character who influences the Helen character's decisions. Ironically, Olive considers Griff's self-blame for the real harm he may or may not have caused an overweening intrusion into her grief over Helen. Olive and Griff's struggles as youthful activists balancing the limits of liberalism against the excesses of radicalism as a cure for social ills interlace with Olive's and Jean's current efforts to define themselves emotionally within an ethical context (Griff having done so long ago). Not to mention the question they raise about whether fiction must be accurate.Not easy but rewarding and certainly timely; Mattison's complex prose matches the multidimensional moral arguments raging inside her prickly, multidimensional characters.

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June 15, 2018

A novel about choices made following one's conscience during the Vietnam War era and afterward could be dramatic and riveting, yet the latest from Mattison (The Book Borrower) is neither. Instead, it's ruminative and anticlimactic, more an exploration of adult friendships, marriage, and how people and their consciences evolve. The story is told from multiple viewpoints. Olive Grossman, an editor, is writing an essay about a high school classmate's best-selling novel that is a thinly veiled biography of Olive's dear friend Helen, who was killed during a violent antiwar protest. Olive's estranged husband, Griff, believes he shares responsibility for Helen's death and has never read the book, until now. He accidentally leaves a copy at a nonprofit where he serves on the board, where it is found by the nonprofit's director Jean Argos, who is challenged with providing respite and privacy to homeless people. All three seem unhappy and a little stuck in their midlives. There is no big denouement or rousing conclusion, but the novel instead shows three humans tiptoeing toward a deeper understanding of their lives and their relationships. VERDICT Recommend for readers who enjoy slow, contemplative novels and deeply drawn middle-aged characters.--Christine Perkins, Whatcom Cty. Lib. Syst., Bellingham, WA

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2018
Friendship tested in the crucible of political upheaval fascinates Mattison, a writer of extraordinary psychological acuity and crisp wit. It shaped her previous novel, When We Argued All Night (2012), and comes to even stronger fruition in this riveting tale of friends who protested the Vietnam War as high-school and college students. Olive, who is a Jewish book editor, essayist, and author of an Edith Wharton biography, met her husband, Griff, an African American descended from prominent pastors and a principal at a high school for at-risk kids, back in the day. Now their long-strained marriage is further pressed when Olive is asked by a magazine to revisit a problematic novel written by Val, a sort-of friend, about the friend Olive truly loved, Helen, who became radicalized with tragic consequences. Both Olive and Griff harbor guilt about Helen and conflicted feelings about Val's novel. They are also at odds over Griff's heading the board of a homeless center and disagreements with its imaginatively compassionate director, Jean, whom Olive quite likes. Mattison's engrossing exploration of diverse matters of conscience is dynamic, precise, many-layered, funny, ambushing, and provocative as she marvels over how contradictory we are, how baffled by ourselves and others, and how we are both stricken and uplifted by moral quandaries.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)