There are sound reasons that Adam Haslett’s debut short story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, and his second novel, Imagine Me Gone, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. With Mothers and Sons—a story about the self-inflicted pain of long-buried memories—he demonstrates once again his ability to produce graceful, emotionally affecting fiction whose characters’ struggles seem as real as those of people we know in our own lives.
At the center of Haslett’s novel are Peter Fischer, a New York City immigration lawyer who specializes in representing clients seeking asylum, and his mother, Ann, a former Episcopal priest who abandoned both the church and her husband 20 years earlier to establish a women’s retreat center—a “ministry of hospitality”—in Vermont with her romantic partner, Clare, and her friend Roberta. Peter and Ann’s relationship, even on its best day, is a cool one.
Peter’s stressful but predictable law practice mostly involves representing victims of political violence, and it’s upended when he takes on Vasel Marku, a 21-year-old man from Albania, as a client. Like Peter, Vasel is gay, and his asylum claim is based on his fear that he’ll be persecuted for his homosexuality if he returns to his homeland. As Peter struggles to persuade a reluctant Vasel to help him gather the evidence Vasel will need to secure a judge’s permission to remain in the United States, his client’s predicament surfaces Peter’s painful memories of his own attraction to a charismatic fellow high school student, Jared Hanlan, and its tragic end two decades earlier.
Deliberately, and with consummate skill, Haslett braids these stories until, in the final third of the novel, he reveals the devastating event that lies at the heart of the emotional gulf Ann and Peter must span. Though it anchors the book, theirs is not the only story of maternal love he explores, layering depth and complexity over an already rich novel and illuminating its plural title. Haslett’s prose is simultaneously efficient and evocative, so that the pleasures of this touching novel extend well beyond those that flow from engaging with a psychologically astute and well-told story. In his capable hands, Mothers and Sons is an exemplar of realist fiction.
