The Hole We're In, by Gabrielle Zevin

On the first page of Zevin's first novel for adults, father and husband Roger Pomeroy decides to return to graduate school to get his doctorate. After all, he thinks, his children are almost grown--although the youngest, Patsy, is only ten. This decision launches the family into a deep financial hole that would have long-lasting emotional and physical ramifications.

While Roger works on his degree at a Texas university and has an affair with his ethically charged adviser, his wife Georgia works two jobs to try to keep the family afloat. But her income barely covers the family's basic needs, much less the costs of daughter Helen's wedding. To pay for the wedding, Georgia takes out credit cards in her children's names, charges them to the max, and doesn't pay them. Son Vinnie, a struggling filmmaker, is estranged from the family and, despite emotional and financial damage, seems to escape the more severe problems his sisters endure. Helen is herself a compulsive shopper who marries a man she doesn't love (but who is in dental school and thus will likely to be able to afford her impulses). Patsy, the youngest sibling, is sent back to her grandmother in Tennessee when her parents learn she has an African American boyfriend and her mother lets her take the blame for something Georgia herself did that was unacceptable to the family's Sabbath-Day Adventist faith. All of this takes place in the book's first section, told in chapters that alternate to provide a view from each family member.

The second section of the book, set six years later in 2006, focuses on Patsy, who has just returned from Iraq, pregnant with a child who is not her husband's and suffering from PTSD. In the third section, set in 2012 and titled "A Relative Paradise," Helen's six-year-old daughter is injured when she falls out of a tree, Georgia finds out she is dying, Roger's assistant Megan confesses her love to him, and Patsy is estranged from her parents though living in the same town. At the end of the section, Georgia whispers to her sleeping husband that she believes none of the religious principles he preaches from the pulpit of the church where he has recently become the pastor.

The final section of the book feels almost tacked on. While the earlier sections dealt with many controversial issues, they were clearly handled in the context of the family's experiences. In the last section, set in 2022, Patsy's daughter Britt is pregnant and wants an abortion--which is now illegal in the United States. They must drive to Canada to obtain a safe abortion; on their way home (they have moved to Florida), they learn that Roger has died and they make a side trip to Tennessee to visit his second wife (the former assistant) and attend the funeral. The book ends with a somewhat philosophical discussion between Patsy, Britt, and Megan.

While the title most obviously refers to the financial holes the family experiences, other holes (in a sock, in a backyard, in a body) also turn up throughout the narrative, sometimes to a powerful effect, sometimes not so much. Despite the emotional traumas the characters experience, Zevin's tone is rather flat--but it works. You don't need layers of description and emotion to feel the emotional holes in which the characters live and to experience a sense of dread about what is going to happen to them.

Although I didn't care for the fourth section of the book, I still think The Hole We're In is well worth reading.

Favorite passages:

It's crazy. . . The connections, she thought. Or the lack of them. The discontinuity. How it was impossible to understand how a person got from point a to point b, even if you were that person and you had been there for every, every step. How there were unseen and mysterious forces beyond yourself. how you run into a woman with no nipples and two weeks later you found yourself on a Greyhound bus bound for Nowheresville.

She thought the festivities were a cross between a business meeting and a trip to a wax museum, perhaps, a wake.

Patsy was not immune to the sight of her mother being escorted out of the Slickmart, to the pretty business of the woman who had raised her come undone. But she had seen some hard things in her life already and had learned to treat everything like the photograph of the thing instead of the thing itself. She could hang the picture in the museum and carry on. And that's what she did. That day was no more or no less than day eleven of Patsy's job at the Slickmart.

(Note that all of these passages are from chapters providing Patsy's perspective--she's obviously the character that the reader--at least this reader--cared most deeply about.)