The State of the Union by Douglas Kennedy

 

Published: 1996, Simon and Schuster

Genre: Fiction

Themes: America, marriage, fidelity, crime

My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤

Douglas Kennedy is the writer who gave us The Pursuit of Happiness, and I had high hopes for this novel, but I don't think it works as well.

It is the story of a marriage told from the perspective of Hannah Buchan, who we meet as a girl in college, and the story runs up to the present day when she has reached her sixties and has both children and grandchildren.  Hannah grew up in the shadow of her father who made a name for himself as the first professor at the University of Vermont to speak out against the war in Vietnam.  Her friends thought this was cool, but Hannah found his reputation put pressure on her to have her own radical streak, but instead she becomes as conformist as possible.

Her mother is a difficult woman, who is blunt to the point of rudeness, and most of the time the family works around her mood swings as carefully as they can, but frequent arguments within the family are unavoidable.  Mother would like Hannah to show more of an independent spirit and encourages her not to end up in an early marriage to a quiet and unassuming man but clearly doesn't get her way.

That is exactly what happens, and Hannah marries a young doctor called Dan and then moves with him to the small town of Pelham, Maine, where he is to work as a community doctor for a year.  By this time she has had a baby and is beginning to feel trapped by household routines and has constant regrets about passing up on an opportunity to study in Paris for a year.  

Not long after they arrive in Pelham, she receives a call out of the blue from a passing acquaintance of her father asking if she can put him up for the night as he is travelling and has nowhere to stay.  Dan is out of town and you can hear the next part of the story hurtling down the tracks as Hannah suddenly seems to be happy to throw her whole life away within hours of Tobias walking through the door.

By the time he has to leave a few days later, she discovers he is a revolutionary who has had a hand in planting a bomb in a building where people were killed in the explosion. This revelation causes her to realise she is guilty of harbouring a fugitive which is a criminal offence.  He coerces her to driving him across the border to Canada which ties her even more firmly to the crime and then he disappears as suddenly as he arrived.  Hannah manages to completely cover her tracks and it appears she has got away with her infidelity, and the crime, but as this is a novel it is clear that the happy outcome cannot last.  Much later in the book everything comes back to bite her just when everything else in her life has been broken by the disappearance of her adult daughter.  

I didn't particularly like Hannah, so it was difficult to have much empathy for the various situations she found herself in.  All the bad things that happened to her were bought about by her own poor choices, and she goes through her life constantly feeling ill-used, although she appears to have everything a young woman would want.  Her mother is portrayed as the most difficult person in the family, but Hannah seems to come a close second, as she is quick to take offence and fans the flames of arguments that she later blames on others.

Much of the story line seems too neat and tidy to be realistic and many things happen far more conveniently than they would in real life.  When Hannah needs a babysitter, there is a local woman on hand that will do the work for almost no payment.  When she needs a job, someone creates on for her.  When she has to drive to Canada overnight with a very young baby in the car, she gets there and back in double quick time and even has time to cover her tracks before picking her husband up at the airport mid-morning the following day.

The last part of the book shows how a life can be shattered over the course of a few days, and just as I was beginning to think that we would see Hannah moving off in a new direction, the story allows her to have everything back again, almost the same as it was.  Again, this is too tidy for credibility and almost seemed as though the writer had run out of steam.

It's not a bad book, just not something that will stick in the mind for years to come.