Hustvedt's 'Sorrows' draws on diaries and dreams

Thankfully, the patient/doctor relationship is not the only narrative line Hustvedt pursues. Told in retrospect by psychiatrist Erik Davidsen, the novel frames what his sister, Inga, calls "the year of secrets." Most central, these two characters, who like Hustvedt make their home in New York City, have recently lost their father. As the two adult children return to their Minnesota home to settle his affairs and sort through the papers he's left behind, they come across diaries that point to a mysterious encounter between their father and a girl during his teenage years, bait that Hustvedt trolls for the next 300 pages.

Still, sprinkled throughout are several crumbs that keep a reader tiptoeing forward. Erik takes a romantic interest in his downstairs tenant, who in the meantime is being stalked by her camera-snapping, art-making ex. Inga, the widow of a famous author, faces down new painful information about her husband's complex past. (Hustvedt herself is the wife of celebrated novelist Paul Auster.) Meanwhile, Inga's 18-year-old daughter is working out her own father issues, complicated by having been direct witness to the twin towers falling. Even if these actions are not momentous, Hustvedt makes her characters' stories quietly engaging.

Yet clotting the momentum are the father's journal entries, interpolated throughout the novel. If Hustvedt's prose is always precise and even elegant, the diaristic passages surface often and without clear reason. Erik will be walking down a Brooklyn street and suddenly his father's words (even paragraphs) come to him with instant recall, at the same time bogging the far more active present. (One finds in the book-concluding acknowledgments this revelation: Although we've been reading a novel, the journal entries are actually Hustvedt's father's verbatim, perhaps pointing to a conceit that proved nigh impossible for the author to offload.)