Strong sensory impressions, vivid metaphors and a stream of consciousness that runs through a mother’s worried mind: The story in Bebe Moore Campbell’s new novel, “72 Hour Hold,” comes on strong and doesn’t let up.
“WhatdidIdowrongwhatdidIdowrongwhatdidIdowrong?” For Keri, the possibilities were endless. Had she smoked cigarettes or rolled an occasional joint during her pregnancy? Had she drunk coffee? Why had she gone to work too soon after Trina was born? Perhaps she should have breast- fed longer. Maybe it was that mean teacher Trina had in elementary school.
As the questions give way to more questions and a search for solutions, it’s clear that something is very wrong with 18-year-old Trina. What’s wrong and what to do about it are central to Campbell’s true-to-life novel of the bond between mother and daughter.
Told from the mother’s point of view and in the mother’s voice, the story is at once poetic, down to earth, ironic and terrifying. An unlikely retelling of the Greek mother/daughter myth of Demeter and Persephone – in which the daughter is lost to the underworld and the mother doesn’t rest until she finds her – this novel is set in present-day Los Angeles. Keri, the mother, is an upwardly mobile, African-American woman and single parent who owns a second-hand clothing shop. The daughter has a bipolar disorder (or as Campbell terms it, a brain flu) triggered by marijuana, teenage rebellion and bad genes.
Feeling more like a memoir than a myth, the book captures the double-edged bond between mother and daughter with its sensory, psychological and emotional links – all of which Campbell records, responds to and plays with the skill of a virtuoso.
As the story opens, Keri wakes up one spring morning and looks at her daughter sleeping beside her, her hip pressed into her mother’s thigh, the pressure of her body comforting. A gifted and talented straight-A student who never had acne, never had braces, the girl is so beautiful that she should have been guaranteed a good life. In fact, Trina had such a life until just after her 17th birthday. Then her teenage rebellion exploded into one manic episode after another.
Now Trina is 18 and under a psychiatrist’s care. But she doesn’t take her medicine, and she likes to smoke pot, which sets off her manic episodes. Keri copes by putting Trina on 72 hour hold (as in the title). Trina will be forced to stay in the hospital for three days, after which there will be a hearing to decide if she needs to stay longer.
Using brief descriptions and few words, Campbell presents Trina as a complex and carefully drawn character who is never so sick that she doesn’t know how to cut her mother deeply with everything from a dirty look to a physical and verbal assault. Trina is also adept at manipulating her mother’s feelings in subtle ways.
If things aren’t bad enough with Trina, Keri has her own mother, Emma, to worry about. An alcoholic, Emma enters and leaves Keri’s life and mind usually by messages on her telephone answering machine and especially when she wants money.
On an emotional roller coaster, Keri is hurt one minute, beguiled the next, then remorseful, or guilty, or worried, or tender, or admiring.
Ever the long-suffering mother whose primary interest is her daughter’s well-being, Keri tries to help her daughter follow her psychiatrist’s orders without upsetting Trina. As Keri walks on egg shells, she fears Trina will hurt herself. Meanwhile, Keri’s blood pressure is going through the roof.
And Trina is busy making a mess in her mother’s house, breaking windows, leaving unflushed toilets, “cheeking” her medicine instead of swallowing it, stealing pot and playing off her father against her mother.
Clyde, Trina’s father and Keri’s former husband, accepts everything that Trina says at face value, even though he’s a successful businessman and should know better. Worse,
Clyde, who has remarried several times, is consumed by his job and has little time to spend with his daughter. Finding it easier to go along with appearances than to accept what’s happening, Clyde denies that Trina has problems and tries to soothe Keri while telling her that she is overreacting to the situation.
One wonders how Clyde has been able to succeed if he is so blind to his daughter’s maneuvers, but Campbell paints Clyde with precision. She does such a convincing job depicting this hands-off father that one can’t help thinking that she was either married to someone like this or grew up with him. Readers will almost react viscerally to the man, as they see what’s at stake: Every time Clyde ignores the danger signals in his daughter’s behavior, he jeopardizes her and puts more pressure on Keri while rendering her less able to help Trina.
The plot see-saws between Trina experiencing psychotic episodes and Trina under control of mood stabilizers, with Keri both witness and victim. Keri eventually stands up to Trina’s out of control mood swings, and although her method backfires, it brings Clyde into the picture.
Not until near the story’s end (the ending is wrapped up a little too quickly, as if the story grew too powerful even for its author to handle) does Clyde begin to understand his daughter’s condition, yet by then it’s almost too late: Trina has been in jail, has lived with a schizophrenic drug addict, has been kidnapped by a group that uses unconventional methods to treat mental illness, has disappeared after hitching a ride with two ominous-looking men in a pickup truck, has run away several times and has been put on several 72-hour holds. That Trina survives under the circumstances is due only to her mother’s persistence.
So powerful is Campbell’s writing that Keri and her story become almost an archetypal rendering of maternal love. Yes, love may be patient and kind. It may bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things. But above all, love is persistent. When the going gets tough, love digs in its heels and stays there.
Diane Scharper is the author of the memoir, “Radiant.” She is editing an anthology of memoirs for the Helen Keller Foundation.
72 Hour Hold
By Bebe Moore Campbell
Knopf, 321 pages, $24.95
