The turbulence of the late 1960s didn’t end with the turn of the decade. In 1972, the Vietnam War was ongoing; the flame of student unrest still smoldered. Peter Carey brings the flavors of the time to a personal level in his novel of life on the lam, “His Illegal Self.”
Che Selkirk hasn’t seen his mother since he was 2. The son of Harvard student radicals, he is being raised by his maternal grandmother. Getting custody had been easy; Che was the star of a 1968 photograph that ran in the Boston Globe, showing his mother, holding her infant son, lying under the bumper of Robert McNamara’s car.
So even though 7-year-old Che can’t remember what his mother looks like, he is sure it is she who walks unexpected into his grandmother’s New York City apartment.
His grandmother seemed to be expecting their guest, and together they go to Bloomingdale’s for perfume. And just when he thought his grandmother would hail a taxi, the young woman propels Che to the subway, then to the Port Authority and, finally, to a bus headed for Philadelphia. Che wants to know what he should call her, hoping she will say “Mom.” She tells him, “You can call me Dial.”
Dial is not Che’s mother. She had taken care of Che as an infant and gone on from South Boston working-class roots to success in academia. Her connection to Susan Selkirk, Che’s mother, is brought up during an interview for an assistant professor position at Vassar. A phone number is passed and, on a whim, Dial calls. She is asked to bring Che to see his mother for a short visit. And from there, things go terribly wrong.
Dial never intended to kidnap the boy, but support from the radical underground and lack of clear thinking put her on the run and keeps her there.
The pair flee to Australia and are hitchhiking when they fall in with Trevor, a man “who lived in a stockade at the top of a very steep unfriendly road, whose most common expression was “Your alarm clock is your key to freedom,” who woke every morning at 5 a.m. and hid out in the bush until it was clear the police would not raid him. Trevor, who saw spies and traitors everywhere, said, “Pick her up.”
Down the hill from Trevor is the hippie commune where Dial finds a place. The community is far off any grid, and not fond of Americans. But there are few choices left at this point, because if Dial tries to return Che, she risks prison.
“His Illegal Self” is told from a third-person perspective, alternating its focus between Che and Dial. The points of view are easily distinguished, often relating complementary views of the same event. In describing the first encounter between Dial and Che, Carey writes, “When the boy was almost eight, a woman stepped out of the elevator into the apartment on East Sixty-second Street and he recognized her straightaway. No one had told him to expect it.
“That was pretty typical of growing up with Grandma Selkirk. You were some kind of lovely insect, expected to know things through your feelers, by the kaleidoscope patterns in the others’ eyes. No one would dream of saying, ‘Here is your mother returned to you.’ ”
The same event looks different when focused on Dial:
“Hello, she said. Is that you?
“To her immense surprise he propelled himself toward her, and she, unprepared for six years of solid growth, was winded by the heft of him, the breadth of his chest, the weight of his bones, his dense needy secret life.”
“You can’t possibly remember me, she cried, delighted, slipping free of her backpack.
“The boy did not reply, just hugged her like a terrific little animal, grinding his chin against her leg.”
Some aspects of the novel work well, most notably the exploration of an imposed mother-son relationship. And Carey excels at creating interesting characters and at capturing setting. But “His Illegal Self” gets muddy in the middle. There is plenty of meat in the relationship between Che and Dial. Adding Trevor to the mix, interesting though he is to watch, brings complication and unanswered questions.
There are a couple of other challenges. The dialogue, unquotationed and terse, comes to feel teeth-grindingly tense. And hovering over it all is a feeling that comes up very early in the novel, when Dial cannot deliver the boy to his mother as planned. She is given a choice to return Che to his grandmother, and for reasons not fully clear, she doesn’t.
Nothing in the novel that follows is able to overcome the voice in the reader’s head that says, “Give the kid back, you twit. Because nothing good will come if you don’t.”
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
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Fiction
His Illegal Self, by Peter Carey, $24.95
