When Madeline Was Young

May 22, 2006
An unusual ménage poses moral questions in this fifth novel (after Disobedience
) from Hamilton, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for The Book of Ruth
. Aaron and Julia Maciver are living in a 1950s Chicago suburb with their two children—and with Aaron's first wife, Madeline. Aaron has insisted on caring for Madeline after she suffered a brain injury soon after their wedding, leaving her with the mental capacity of a seven-year-old. Refusing to consider this arrangement inconvenient, Julia treats the often-demanding Madeline like a beloved daughter, even letting her snuggle in bed with Aaron and herself when Madeline becomes distraught at night. Decades later, the Macivers' son, Mac, now a middle-aged family practitioner with a wife and teenage daughters, prepares to attend the funeral of his estranged cousin's son, killed in Iraq, and muses about the meaning, and the emotional costs, of the liberal values of his parents. Hamilton brings characteristic empathy to the complex issues at the core of this patiently built novel, but the narrative doesn't take any clear direction. Though Mac suggests there are "gothic possibilities" in his parents' story (partly inspired, Hamilton says, by Elizabeth Spencer's The Light in the Piazza
), the Macivers' passions remain tepid and unresolved, and Julia remains an enigma to her son.

July 1, 2006
As in her previous novels (e.g., "A Map of the World"), Hamilton sets her latest work in her native Midwest. Pragmatic, smart, and sensitive Timothy -Mac - Maciver, a married physician with three daughters, tells the story of his family and upbringing in suburban Chicago and how a tragedy that disrupted his father -s first marriage impacted all their lives. Mac -s first-person narrative moves back and forth in time and highlights his parents - relationship as well as his own relationship with Madeline, the woman known as his much older -sister, - whose life was derailed at the age of 25. Mac focuses with refreshing candor on his shifting responsibilities concerning Madeline as well as on what it was like to be a young man witnessing the escalating Vietnam War and its triggering of family debates and tension. Hamilton draws a parallel between the Vietnam conflict and the current war in Iraq (Mac -s cousin, a career military man, has a son who enlists to fight in Iraq). While Hamilton gives the political climate of the Sixties considerable attention, her story is more about how people, by bonding together, can transcend tragedy and loss with love, tolerance, and humor. Recommended for all fiction collections." -Maureen Neville, Trenton P.L."

Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2006
Hamilton, twice an Oprah author, is a master of the baffling and the bizarre. In her fifth and most psychologically prismatic novel to date, Hamilton's signature motifs take on new resonance and mystery as she creates perplexing familial relationships complicated by war. Raised in a Chicago suburb, Timothy Maciver--a future small-town doctor called Brains by his macho cousin, Buddy, and Mac by everyone else--considers the willowy, slow-witted beauty in the family a sister. But Madeline is actually Mac's father's first wife. Soon after the wedding, she suffered a brain injury that left her with the mind of a child. The second Mrs. Maciver cares for her damaged predecessor with infinite patience and strange tenderness while raising her two high-achieving and watchful children. This gothic configuration with its troubling erotic undercurrents allows Hamilton, who was inspired, in part, by Elizabeth Spencer's " The Light in the Piazza "(1960), to explore wildly divergent casts of mind and nearly mythic conundrums. Add to that a family divided over the Vietnam War as Buddy enlists and Mac becomes a conscientious objector, influenced almost against his will by his vehemently antiwar mother. The cousins don't reunite until after Buddy's soldier son serves in Iraq. Hamilton has never written more finely nuanced or beguiling prose, imagined more fascinating characters, or posed more provocative moral dilemmas. In each surprising permutation, Hamilton offers fresh perspectives on the puzzles of time, memory, and consciousness, and keenly gauges the many shades of guilt and audacity, grief and sacrifice, tenacity and goodness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)