Can you escape the choices you made when you were young? (Seattle and Albuquerque, backstories Montana and LA; 1987 to 2013): Jennifer Haupt writes exquisitely, her prose agonizing and heartening. Wrapped up together, yet at odds with each other. The effect, piercing and memorable.
I was bowled over by In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills, her 2018 debut (see review), an unforgettable novel of unthinkable violence and loss set in Rwanda ten years after a million people perished in the genocide in 1994. Made even more harrowing against the backdrop of a beautiful landscape in a country inhabited by spectacular, endangered mountain gorillas, and a gorgeous love story. It remains, for me, one of the most beautifully written and affecting novels in memory. Haupt spent eleven years writing it. Thus, a very hard act to follow. Second novels in general can sometimes disappoint. Come as You Are, though, is equally compelling in a drastically different way, although you’ll see some of the same themes of how to forgive, heal, and move forward in terms of grief, loss, and human failings. How extraordinarily difficult it is to move beyond past history.
Haupt lives in Seattle, so we didn’t have to wait as long for her next novel in which the lives, bond, and history between the two main characters – Skye and Zane – were forged as adolescents in the 1990s “Seattle grunge” music era. Both lonely and alienated, they vowed to be “best buds forever.” Skye was twelve when she met Zane, a rock guitarist in a band called the Bipolars wanting to make it big like his idol Kurt Cobain and his legendary band Nirvana. Music was the one place Zane felt he belonged, and where Skye spent so much time protected by him. Art, his love of music and hers drawing, mixed well. He had a girlfriend, friends with Skye’s older sister, until he kissed Skye. “Jesus, that kiss,” now he’s the one bowled-over. A kiss that changed their lives.
Come as You Are is a novel about that change as the story alternates between past and present, when Skye is twenty-eight and living in Albuquerque, New Mexico and the mother of a nine-year-old girl, Montana/Tanya. You’ll see why she was named that as chapters also show us what happened in Joplin, Montana and Los Angeles. It’s in New Mexico, though, where mother and daughter form new and beautiful bonds estranged from Zane.
“Cobain wrapped the restless passion of an entire generation into a three-minute anthem.” Cobain, from Seattle, committed suicide at twenty-seven. He represents “the success, the excess, the emptiness.” Some of his 90s music is here – Smells Like Teen Spirit, About a Girl, and Come as You Are – a perfect title for Haupt’s novel of finding a place where you’re accepted with people you trust. The lyrics also signify the conflicting emotions you’ll see in the novel as the past, Zane, reenters the picture.
“Music is religion,” so the novel comes with its own playlist of the songs of the other grunge bands, such as Mudhoney, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains. One of the venues where these Seattle bands played was the OK Hotel, here too. “How did a five-letter word meaning dirt, filth, become synonymous with a musical genre, a fashion statement, a pop phenomenon?” the New York Times asked in 1992 (Haupt refers to it in the novel).
Skye and Zane had nicknames for each other: he called her Skywalker and she called him Darth. They’re not cinematic Star Wars characters but they are cinematic. Zane has made a few BIG mistakes he’s haunted by. He became addicted to an assortment of mind-bending drugs, but he’s not stereotyped. Haupt gradually lets us see him fully and empathetically, sharing a secret he’s kept to himself since first grade. His anger and shame, his rehab and therapy, how he’s grown up and yet still making mistakes. He didn’t intend to be evil like Darth Vader but he has harmed people. He wants to make up for that. Can he? And: Can he be trusted?
Skye was a lost soul in adolescence, also haunted by a loss, blaming herself and keeping it secret. Both Skye and Zane still blame themselves for this shared secret, along with two adults who also feel responsible. We feel their anguish. Does it always have to be someone’s fault? Regardless, the torment never goes away.
“Who were we back when?” is a universal question we might all be asking when we reflect on our own youthful inexperience and immaturity, when we didn’t think before we acted about the consequences of our behaviors. Can we ever forget the mistakes we made? Forgive ourselves?
Issues of abandonment are embedded in the losses. Can we reconcile with those we abandoned? And those who abandoned us? Abandoned spirits are in this novel as they were in Rwanda. There’s no way the two could EVER be comparable, but the consequences of what it takes to get past painful history is also here fictionally, interpersonally. We will never understand nor should we ever forget crimes against humanity, but Haupt has now turned her literary and empathetic eye on how profound human frailties can break hearts and people.
Haupt’s empathy is also shown in two of her other pursuits. One editing a moving collection of reflections by ninety writers on the isolation, loneliness, and grief of losing loved ones during the pandemic in Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in The Time of COVID-19. The Washington Post wondered if there “could be a timelier gift to quarantined readers.”
She also writes a column for Psychology Today called One True Thing, described as writing “about the connection between grief and love” as well as “finding family in unexpected places/ways.” Precisely what she writes about in Come as You Are.
The new family Skye and Tanya have found in an unexpected place and unexpected ways are Aaron and his mother Enola, descendants of an ancient pueblo tribe outside of Albuquerque. The Sandia Pueblo, “land in the valley below the mountains for centuries, nourishing his ancestor’s farms and cultures.” The pueblo tribe believes when “someone dies before their time” “the wind of their spirit remains on earth, abandoned in a way between worlds.”
Aaron, is studying to be a lawyer, drawn to the environmental issues in the Southwest. When the novel opens, Skye’s engaged to be married to him. We see how good he is for her and Tanya. But is she “all in?” Perceptive of Aaron to ask the question when Zane shows us up after years of estrangement. What happens if she lets him back into the picture? What does that mean for her and Aaron? More important now that she’s a mother who loves her daughter with all her heart and soul (so does Aaron and Enola) is what would that mean for Tanya?
Aaron offers love, stability, and economic security. Skye has been on her own for a while, still struggling to earn a decent living wage so we get an intimate look at what it that feels like for single mothers and others across the country struggling from paycheck to paycheck. The Zane she loved was from the past. She really doesn’t know how she feels about him now. She owes it to Aaron, herself, and Tanya to find out. Is she strong enough to risk finding out?
Rhythm is everywhere. In the prose. In the music. In different forms of love. In Nature. In the push and pull of the journey. You don’t want to miss it. And you won’t forget it.
Lorraine