“You left them alone in the apartment?” Tess says.
Lynn Steger Strong, 2022
///
In the grand tradition of Christmas ghost stories, a family is haunted by their recently deceased matriarch in Lynn Steger Strong’s latest novel.
Three grown siblings navigate the first Christmas without their mother, whose singular presence in life had bound their contrasting families together. And though Helen may not physically manifest like Dicken’s Marley, her memory is an ephemeral guide, speaking uniquely to each family member as they converge in a cold, sleepy town in upstate New York. Recollections of her illuminate the past, traditions bring comfort and a sense of loss to the present, and indistinct paths lead to uncertain futures.
Like “Want,” Strong’s previous book, “Flight” explores the complicated and tenuous relationships people have to places, money, and each other. The people Strong populates her stories with are not fixed stars; they are transitional figures, navigating from a growing sense of who they currently are to what they’re not entirely sure they want to become.
In lesser hands this book would have been about a fraying extended family and the entropy caused by the death of the central figure who kept them together. But here, long-standing exasperations give way to the begrudging comfort of familiarity. Moments of real emotional intimacy live alongside fleeting glimpses of contempt.
What is “family?” Is it a thing we fly from, to forge our own paths and escape expectations we never asked for? Or is it something we fly to, for the kind of amity and sanctuary only it can provide?
Perhaps it’s both.