E-Mail This Article to a Friend Love and loss Novels about the awkward ties that bind BY RICCO VILLANUEVA SIASOCO

Tolstoy’s somewhat pessimistic declaration (to writers, among other fools) at the outset of Anna Karenina — "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" — resonates in the latest work of the fine novelists Alice Mattison, Dan Chaon, and Stacey D’Erasmo. In their stories of familial love and loss, we glimpse a wife unabashed about blurring extramarital sex with marital love; a young college dropout seeking the forsaken older brother he has never embraced; and a hip trio of urban parents (who happen to be gay) dealing with their son’s mental illness. Portraying the ordinary discord of family life, these novels render the unhappy lives of mothers, brothers, and strange bedfellows in compelling ways.

The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman, by Alice Mattison (William Morrow, $23.95). Why do women who like sex get a bad rap? Historically, a woman who celebrates her sexuality invites either controversy or knee-jerk judgment: think of bawdy Mae West and her battles with uptight film censors in the 1930s, or the public’s branding of Erica Jong’s sexually explicit novel Fear of Flying. In her assured fourth novel, The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman, Mattison has created a gutsy female narrator named Daisy Andalusia, who is unapologetic about her peccadilloes both present (with a client, the intriguing Yale researcher named Gordon Skeetling) and past (with a messy young drug addict a decade her junior). Daisy’s complex notions about her behavior offer the astute reader an alternative to ordinary notions of love.

A fiftysomething professional space planner, our heroine is opinionated, contentious, and somewhat ambivalent about her new husband, a buttoned-down real-estate baron named Pekko. Daisy (whose name calls to mind — intentionally? — Henry James’s firebrand Daisy Miller) is at a plateau in her new marriage: she is loving but not blindly in love; worrisome, but not particularly worried. As described by Pekko and all her family, Daisy is a difficult woman who keeps secrets — not just about her infidelity, but about her disdain for friends, for example, or about the simple realities of her work life. One of her signature traits involves atoning for her half-truths with half-deeds in other parts of her busy life: joining a sibling for a boring dinner as punishment for her indiscretion with her lover, or making nice with a client to appease her own sense of guilt. At one point in the novel, Daisy even mitigates her extramarital affair by settling upon the total number of times she’ll sleep with her lover: five times, she thinks, and then she will be done.

Much like Virginia Woolf, Mattison has a great skill (apparent in all her work, particularly the much-praised The Book Borrower) for crafting reflective creatures, prone to questioning their own actions and muddled thinking. About her stuffy older brother, Daisy thinks: "For him, everything that happens successfully does so by an unlikely accident. I’ve fought and argued with him on that subject much of my life, but that day in August, settling into his car, for a moment I gave up trying to be the successful sister and wished I’d shared his almost Eastern European pessimism all along." On sleeping with two men, Daisy is meditative, finding meaning in a mostly carnal act: "So I’d learn again why I needed both: my husband with his reliable, almost workmanlike attitude toward sex, and my lover, who fucked exuberantly and originally, talking all the time (often not about me or what we were doing), and who seemed eager not so much to please as to interest me."

There is no epigraph at the beginning of Mattison’s engaging novel, no easy introduction to the kitchen sink of Daisy’s mind. It’s a telling fact, this lack of literary allusion: The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman asks us to enter an imaginary world without preconceptions, to find new ways of reflecting on love.

You Remind Me of Me, by Dan Chaon (Ballantine, $24.95). The late fiction writer John Cheever defined a story in two ways: someone goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. Pretty much all stories conform in one way or another to this useful adage. Consider Odysseus, fidgety with wanderlust, who upon finding himself finally at home only sets off again for another adventure across the sea. Or a story as modern as E.T., in which a wrinkled extraterrestrial arrives in a sunny California suburb and alters the lives of the quirky kids who care for him.

In You Remind Me of Me, Dan Chaon incorporates both of Cheever’s ideas. One wide-eyed character, the college dropout Jonah, journeys across the Midwest to find his abandoned brother; the brother, a troubled bartender named Troy, questions the strange new co-worker who rolls into his small Nebraska town.

From the get-go, this intelligent novel leaps across linear time, forfeiting chronological narrative in favor of a fragmented, Kurosawa-like structure told from several points of view. The story begins on March 24, 1977, with a bang-up image of a little boy being resuscitated after a Doberman-pinscher attack, then shifts in the next chapter to a teenager smoking marijuana in a trailer home several states away. Fast on the heels of that pot-happy scene is a shift not only in place but in time: 20 years forward, in fact, to June 4, 1997, and the innocuous events before the disappearance of another little boy. Where does all this purposeful confusion lead? How do such asynchronous events add up to a cohesive tale? Throughout his novel, Chaon asks us to overlay the pieces of the story like the onionskin of an architectural drawing: sizing up corners, accumulating facts, connecting the ways that Jonah and Troy and their brooding kin attempt to build homes.

Fans of Chaon’s writing — a cultish clan whose members include writers’ writers like Jean Thompson and Lorrie Moore — will recognize the author’s oddly beguiling voice. In the Chaon’s precise, slightly nefarious hands, these characters often move in a Vicodin-like haze (reminiscent of the narrator in "Big Me," an engrossing Gothic story from Chaon’s collection Among the Missing). Here, the novelist imagines a lost mother who looks upon her son’s "large, unblinking eyes, his thin, almost skeletal head, like the head of a baby bird" before she suddenly "swings up and connects with the side of his face, knocking him onto the floor." Chaon’s talent appears in grounding the most shocking act of violence in the quiet image of that "head of a baby bird." The son’s resulting black eye leaves us pondering: is this really the mindset of an abusive parent? Do we unintentionally hurt the ones we love?

A Seahorse Year, by Stacey D’Erasmo (Houghton Mifflin, $24). In a well-conceived novel, the tragedy of a missing child must function like an ornate set piece: prominent on stage, central to the movement of the characters, yet not so obtrusive as to dominate the rest of the story. In Stacey D’Erasmo’s second novel, A Seahorse Year, the author gracefully manages this feat: she sets the disappearance of a wild teenage son at the heart of the novel, while leaving ample space for the other characters — the teenager’s unraveling family and friends — to breathe.

Like both You Remind Me of Me, with its abucted child, and The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman, with its murdered-teen subplot, D’Erasmo’s novel uses a child in danger to evoke the sense of love and loss that arises in the midst of family crisis. Christopher is a troubled high-schooler who disappears from his San Francisco home one summer day, leaving a single trace: an ordinary kitchen knife, straight as a ramrod, dug into his bedroom floor. Hal and Nan (his birth parents) and Marina (Nan’s lover) are left to deal with each other in his absence and upon his eventual return.

The collective sadness of these characters manifests itself in both predictable and surprising images, some more successful than others. Marina undressing Nan in their tile bathroom, removing her lover’s muddy clothes, and lowering her into a warm bath is a touching, almost biblical image. The tone of Hal readying to greet a new beau, on the other hand, feels uneven in its combination of slapstick and remorse: "For a second, Hal almost turns back. He is silly with his flowers and his fan and his vase, piled up in the back seat of a station wagon. Wooing is a power trip, essentially. He should go back into therapy." However, these out-of-place moments are overshadowed by D’Erasmo’s compelling images of repose, as when Hal window-shops for his loves or Marina reproduces the same bare tree in the paintings of her studio. Also notable are the scenes depicting Christopher’s struggle with mental illness in the book’s latter half. Throughout A Seahorse Year, D’Erasmo presents the everyday moments of family life with painterly precision and care.

Ricco Villanueva Siasoco can be reached at siasoco@bc.edu