Well reviewed a few years ago, it turns out Amy Bloom’s Away is the kind of historical fiction that doesn’t have a lot of effect on me. The main character, Lillian Leyb, travels across North America in the mid-1920s so that she can get to Siberia where her daughter might be. I loved her character, but the story itself is a tale of repeated advancing and falling back. There’s some decent moral takeaways as well.
In the early parts of the book, Lillian Leyb is introduced as a Jewish immigrant in New York City. She’s unsentimental, other than a deep love for her dead child Sophia. She meets people, cares for them, and is willing to take on roles for them without much fuss. Beard for the gay Yiddish theater star, no problem. Lover to his father, no problem. She views much of her life almost as a business transaction. She becomes fond of many of the characters she meets, but her interaction is almost an exchange of services for her.
Then she finds out that the pogrom that drove her out of Russia might not have left her child dead. A new immigrant to New York City carries a story with her of a neighbor saving the child and adopting her as her own in Siberia. Lillian must go find her even if the story isn’t true. But both lovers fail to assist her, showing the pitfalls of transaction based loyalty. Her alternative to a steamship trip back across the Atlantic (which she cannot afford), is to travel to Alaska via Seattle, and from there to boat across the Bering Straight to Siberia. But without money, the trek is easier said than done.
This is not a story of an inexorably advancing fight against the odds. Lillian falls into situation after situation, usually coming out of them worse for the wear, though sometimes closer to the end of her journey. In some ways, this is nice to see in a story. It’s kind of the opposite of Eric Flint’s 1632 where everything works out for the protagonists. But it also makes for a depressing story.
I also found the moral ambiguity refreshing. Murder, sex, mistressing, prostitution, theft, death, abandonment. The characters perform these things, and don’t really dwell on whether they are damned to hell for doing so. Likewise when similar bad things happen to them, it isn’t an occasion for the gnashing of teeth. Stuff happens in the world and they pick up and move on to the next thing. A few of the characters have deep attachments to some of the other characters: Lillian to her child Sophie, Reuben Burstein to his son, Gumdrop to her cousin Snooky, and a few others. But even then when bad things happen, the character pick up and continue with their lives, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Fiction often portrays the climaxes of stories as the completion of a person, but in real life, this is usually not so. We grieve when someone dies, we feel violated by theft or abandonment, but something else comes along in our lives and we deal. Away reflects this.
But while it may be fairly true to life in that respect, when the climax of a story isn’t a climax, it makes for a less than interesting plot. I enjoyed the characters very much, but since I’m a pretty plot-based reader, I couldn’t whole-heartedly enjoy the novel.
A few other blogged reviews:
Title: Away
Author: Amy Bloom
Cover creator: Sherrie Wolf (painter)
Imprint / publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Format: Paperback
Length: 235 p.
Publication date: 2008
ISBN-13: 978-0-8129-779-0
