In the book New York in the '50s, by Dan Wakefield, there's a photograph of the sociologist C. Wright Mills roaring off on his motorcycle, a surprising image that we could interpret, with some poetic license, as a symbol of the power of some of Mills' ideas. Mills' The Sociological Imagination advances the interesting hypothesis that individual facts, standing alone, don't mean very much. They have to be connected by a theory in order to make an impact. The way McLarin's narrator, Grace Jefferson, puts it is:

One man's joblessness is his own problem—unless that man is black, and fifty percent of black men in New York City are also unemployed. One woman's homelessness is her own sad concern—unless the supply of affordable housing in a city has doubled to near nothingness. One child flunking a standardized test is the headache of that child's parent, exclusively—unless sixty to seventy percent of the children in Boston public schools also can't pass the test.

Grace Jefferson is a wholly up-to-date woman, a PhD in sociology, mother of two young girls, married to a successful scientist named Eddie who strongly longs to father a son, a desire that Grace really doesn't share; this situation percolates slowly throughout the novel, commencing when Grace takes the morning-after pill (aided, in a hilarious exchange on the phone, by a Dr. Aranki) and gathering steam, steadily, until Eddie accidentally uncovers this behavior (which she's tried to keep hidden from him) toward the end, where it coincides with another serious choice Grace has made.

Most reviews of this novel approach it from the standpoint of its being about motherhood—which it most assuredly is—but it's about much more than that, too; and, in my opinion, it's quite worthwhile to check these less obvious areas.

Three sets of Grace's relationships form the backbone of the story: those to her mother and grandmother, her husband and children, and her friend Valerie. These connections create a series of time mirrors around Grace; we see that, in some ways, she's exactly like the others, in some ways very different. McLarin takes the risk of brief departures from Grace's first-person narrations, which make up the majority of the tale, to offer third-person accounts of episodes in the lives of Rae, her grandmother, and Mattie, her mother. One of the reasons this potentially artificial narrative experiment works is that it allows us to see the similarities between Rae and Mattie that Grace can't see. It gives us, as readers, a privilege that Grace, tha main character, doesn't have. For example, in the very first scene, Rae is sort of half-raped in a cotton field and, when the man finishes with her, "She pushed him off, pulled down her skirt." Years later, Mattie "put her hands against my father's chest and pushed", in an effort to get free. Obviously, the pushes are literal, but they're symbolic, as well. They're also part of the construction of the Sociological Imagination: If one woman wants to push her repulsive lover off herself so she can get free, that's her own little knotty point, but if hundreds—thousands? millions?—have the same appetency, it's something more. And Grace rejects Eddie in ways that have a similar spirit, the strongest expression of which occurs near the end, when she briefly participates in her sister Lena's insane road adventures. McLarin uses this narrative technique to point out differences, also: Grace is a bookworm, an academic, while Rae "at fifteen had long since given up on what good could be located on the inside of schooling books".

I don't have any doubt that, with time, the character of Rae will be recognized as one of the great characters in the fiction of this era. Facing the world alone from age fifteen on, she survives purely by her own wits and an ability to control and manipulate (we see a few scenes in which she scams Mattie out of money; it's clear that Mattie isn't the only person to whom she does this). Somehow, McLarin is able to give us an accurate portrait of Rae's entire life without ever really dwelling at great length on it anywhere ("She died as she had lived: solitary, defiant, nobody holding her hand.") In the beginning, as a child in the cotton fields just before World War II, she is said to be able to pick as much cotton as any man; at the end, on her deathbed, fighting her daughter and granddaughter, her weak blows are compared to snowflakes. (But she's spunky as ever; her persona can't be depleted or diminished with age, as her physical body can.)

Whereas Rae lives her life, essentially, as a hustler, wholly selfish, not especially concerned with her family, Mattie works hard for her kids, getting a job with the U.S. Postal Service and putting in a lot of overtime. In fact, her husband, Cush—Cush Breedlove, notice—seems to present her with a choice: "The way we used to be...Just me and you. Nobody pulling on us, tugging on us all the time. It was sweet, wasn't it, baby?" Simply unable to step up to the responsibilities of being a father, he's coaxing her to bring their kids to her mother for awhile. The irony is that, a young mother, Rae had run off with a man and left Mattie behind. More ironically still, Grace will come to to have these same feelings that her daughters are "pulling on her". Mattie, correctly, is horrified by the idea of leaving her babies with Rae, and Cush eventually leaves her.

Ostensibly, Grace has everything—handsome husband with a great job at a major drug company, highly educated, herself (she was let go, though, from the faculty at Duke University, denied tenure, and this weighs heavily), two great kids, beautiful house in Boston, much to be envied. From the beginning, as soon as we meet her, she has the thought that she could leave her family as her grandmother did. (McLarin's first novel, Taming It Down, also begins with the heroine in a disturbed state, looking for a psychotherapist.) What makes her feel this way? The short, uncomplicated answer is that her husband and her children are choking her to death, taking all of her space. In the first chapter, she's symbolically, accidentally, locked in the basement of the house. She acknowledges that the men in her mother's and grandmother's lives haven't been very loving guys, and she's, therefore, confused by her own husband's loving, extremely social nature. He insists on trying to make her pregnant with a boy, against her wishes. I found it immensely interesting to compare the following two excerpts—the first from Grace, the second about Rae and her first husband:

Really, what was my problem anyway? House too big? Bills too paid? Kids too healthy and well-fed?

Hootie had treated her well—no beatings, no slipping out, no throwing her down anyway when she said 'no', and he never asked her to rise earlier or work harder or sweat longer than he did, himself.

Note, in the second passage, that what most of us would consider to be the barest minimum hygeine factors of a successful relationship, mere requirements for survival, she considers being treated well. What would she say if she found herself living under the conditions described in the first passage! McLarin implies, though she never really specifically states, that Rae and Grace share some dark, selfish, even Machiavellian impulses, some sort of soul-commiseration. Grace spends a good part of the novel wondering about Rae; in one scene, she journeys to Providence from Boston looking for Rae, following a false clue she's gotten from an Internet search that is, of course, a dead end. Her last meeting with her grandmother, in this world, only becomes possible when Mattie joins in, when the three of them can be present. The two personalities of Rae and Mattie—the battler who would forsake even her own children and the martyr who exists only for her children—in the end are combined in Grace. (Mattie, now that her own kids are grown and gone, serves as a foster parent in her sixties, unable to get the need to be a mother out of her system.) Grace has got the emotional DNA of both of the older women.

In my opinion, the real pith of the novel occurs in the relationship that takes up the least amount of space and time—that of Grace and her new friend, Valerie. The two women mirror each other in many ways, are what is called, in screenplay writing classes, the reflection characters—both African American mothers in their thirties with kids (three boys in Valerie's case), women of education. They meet in the park where they take the kids to play. Although the outer circumstances of their lives seem quite similar, their interior wiring is quite different. Where Grace is nervy, on edge, confused, and in the grip of existential dread, Valerie is very nearly a fully actualized person, almost monk-like in the Zen peace of a harmonic life. Her husband and her children are still creatures of wonder and fascination to her, something that Grace can no longer imagine. Grace on her husband:

Back in the early days of our relationship, back when we still had the energy to explore each other's inner life...I'd be reading on the living room couch or at the computer doing work or at the kitchen table contemplating space and Eddie would say something and the irritation would just crawl up my back. I would think: Can't you just leave me alone?

On her children:

But to have children is to understand the impulse toward child abuse. As a parent, you will say and do things to your children that you would never say and do to anyone else—because society would not allow it; because no one can rattle you the way your children can...You will be horrified at the way you behave.

At one point, when her kids ask her why they have to do a certain thing, she's horrified to hear herself give the response she loathed as a little girl: "Because I said so!" The beauty of the passage that follows should be read in the text, within the flow of the story, so I won't quote it here. As dissatisfied in marriage and parenthood as Grace is, Valerie's satisified, but when a couple of unexpected events badly rock Valerie's universe, we come to see the lives of Rae, Mattie and Grace very differently, and Grace's brief acquaintance with Valerie teaches her a lot. And it teaches us, too. In a way, the entire story is an investigation of how Valerie was able to get to an emotional haven that Grace isn't, and why—and if—Valerie's evident happiness is—or can even, in theory, be—real.

There's so much in the novel I haven't gotten into—Grace's thoughts about some of her in-laws, her observation of young black teenagers on the streets of the Providence ghetto, her memories of one of her beloved professors in college, her sister Lena's ability to sense emotional truth about Grace's daughter when Grace can't, and that's just a sampling. McLarin has a sharp, sharp lens. If someone ever asks you to recommend a good story about generational relationships, here it is. Or about motherhood, or marriage, or modern feminism, or strong women, or the application of intellectual ideas in fiction. Jump at the Sun works with a wide net, and it catches everything.

THE INTERVIEW

QUINONES: At one point, Grace dwells a bit on the David S. Adams exercise in which students make a timeline concurrently showing major national events of the last fifty years and significant events in their own family over the same span. I found myself doing this in my mind as I read. Is this something you intended to encourage readers to do? To participate in the novel, as it were, in this way?


McLARIN: I'm not sure I wanted to encourage readers to do the exercise themselves, per se, or expected them to. I rarely write with such deliberate intention; the most I can do is hope readers gain something meaningful from the work, some illumination or expansion of thought. I just happened to stumble across that exercise while doing research for Grace's sociology degree and it struck a nerve with me. I sat down to do it myself, and it crystallized some things for me; it put my family's struggles and accomplishments in a perspective I had not fully considered before. And, frankly, that's saying something, because I'm black, and black people in America are far more aware than whites of how intricately connected our personal prospects are with the wider political situation, at any given time. So, I put the exercise in—not so much to get people to do it, but, primarily, as a clear and vivid means of putting across the concept of the sociological imagination. Because, outside the framework of the novel, it's an important concept, and one I think would improve society if more people had a grasp of it. And within the novel, it is this concept that raises Grace's existential dilemma above the status of simple, whiny, navel-gazing to a broader, more encompassing struggle.

QUINONES: At three junctures, you introduce film or TV to simultaneously play a role within the story and to comment on events taking place within the story: Grace reflects on Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, Imitation of Life, and the O.J. Simpson trial. Can you give us your views on how film and TV compare with prose fiction as an artistic means of enriching our lives? As a corollary to that, did the story necessitate that you use movies and TV, or was that a creative choice you made?

McLARIN: I don't think the story necessitated the use of movies or television. But Grace, like myself, is a child of the seventies, and if you grew up during that time you were—unless your parents were back-to-nature hippies or something—watching television great, huge chunks of time. For better or worse, many of Grace's cultural references come from television and film. And of course it's only gotten worse with the following generation. The college students I teach have almost no common literary references. Outside of my reading list, there are almost no works of fiction or literary nonfiction or biography that I can mention in class and have all the students—or even most—know what I'm talking about. Even my writing students are more likely to reference a movie or a television than a novel or a play when critiquing each other's work. Also, Grace, as a sociologist, knows how powerful media is in our society, how film and television not only reflect our reality but actively create it. She understands how the media shapes our views of ourselves and the world. Let's face it: you can't say that's true of literature for most of our fellow Americans—especially not fiction. Which is a tremendous loss, of course. Because, in the end, I do think literature is superior to film—and, especially, TV—in illuminating what it means to be human, which is the purpose of art. That's why I encourage my writing students to aim for art in their work, though I know many of them will not and, indeed, have no interest in doing so. Some people will aim instead for entertainment, and that's fine. There's a place for entertainment in the world. I consume entertainment as much as the next guy. But the difference is this: when you close the book at the end of an entertainment, or walk out of a film that was strictly entertainment, you are precisely the same person as you were when you opened the book or walked into the theater. You've been distracted for a few hours, diverted, which is all good, but your perceptions and thoughts and ideas have remained unchanged. You have not gained an ounce of insight into what it means to be human in this world. But when you close the book at the end of a work of art, you have changed, however slightly. You have expanded in some way. And that's powerful.

QUINONES: Grace seems to be genuinely surprised by a lot of the thoughts she finds herself having—particularly about her husband and kids. Is it fair to say that her reflections about her mother and grandmother, at least in part, stem from a desire to know if their emotions of motherhood were at all similar?


McLARIN: Yes, in part. Grace is struggling with motherhood; and, so, being a sociologist and thus trained to look at these things in a so-called scientific way, she turns to the only two models of motherhood she knows for illumination. I think many women do, consciously or subconsciously. When we become mothers, ourselves, we either come to understand our own mothers better or—if they were distant and removed and terrible and we feel nothing but overwhelming love and happiness—become more removed from them. Of course I don't believe that most women feel nothing but overwhelming love and happiness about mothering; that's part of what the book is about. It's better today, of course; but, still, society conspires to make one think motherhood will be all roses and baby shampoo commercials and so when—and if—a woman experiences ambivalence, or even, sometimes, anger or loathing toward her children, she feels like a monster. Because nobody else ever feels that way, right? Certainly nobody talks about it. So, she feels like a monster, which just makes things worse. Instead of normalizing those feelings, so the woman can acknowledge them and process and let them go, we demonize them and the women who have them. I mean, Tom Cruise, with his wacko comments about Brooke Shields, is just the most blatant and ridiculous manifestation of the prevailing hegemony.