Auslander
by Mary PowellTCU Press, 304 pp., $24.50
Sex, lies, drugs, and incest — just another day in small-town Texas. Or, as Mary Powell sees it, just another day in three generations of a prominent German-American family from the fictional Hill Country town of Schoenberg. Spanning the early Sixties through the early Eighties, Auslander reveals the secrets and conflicts of the Jahn family as they struggle with the rapidly changing times, the mores of small-town life, and their complicated emotional dynamics with one another. The story in this book follows the scheme of an old-fashioned pot boiler, chronicling the marriages, births, deaths, and separations within the family. It also documents the Jahns’ financial success as the land that has been in the family for decades becomes more and more valuable. But as fortunes rise, turmoil develops.
The women of the Jahn family step out from the cast and take center stage. Each one narrates the book in alternating sections — there’s Queenie, the matriarch of the family; Vera, her niece and adopted daughter; Carol-Anne, Queenie’s daughter-in-law; and Shelia, Carol-Anne’s mother. Alternating narrators is a bold stylistic choice, somewhat reminiscent of Virginia Woolf, but here it doesn’t always work: Unfortunately, the voices of these characters aren’t distinctive enough to warrant providing each of them with their own section of the story. Occasionally, their dialogue suffers from Powell’s tendency to have them relate large chunks of Texas history to one another. It’s hard to imagine that on her first visit to her daughter and new grandson, Shelia would want to discuss the details of the settlement of Schoenberg. It’s hard enough to follow the history of a large, extended family without being interrupted by a public service announcement.
The knot that binds the ties of all these women is Fritz, Queenie’s son. Moody and conservative, Fritz dutifully bears the expectations of his parents and grapples with the complications of his marriage. He once admired his wife Carol-Anne’s carefree ways; now he has very definite ideas about how a proper wife should behave. But Carol-Anne isn’t buying any of that. She senses that something is going on between Fritz and Vera. Fritz and Vera are first cousins, raised from infancy as brother and sister. Their affair is the family’s most dramatic secret and one of the most problematic aspects of the book. It’s not their violation of traditional moral codes that’s troubling, it’s their refusal to consider how their on-again, off-again affair affects the rest of the family. They become self-righteous and contemptuous of Carol-Anne, who has suffered greatly from her well-founded suspicions about the two and who has an affair of her own. Despite their hypocrisy and narcissism, Powell doesn’t suggest that we are supposed to see these two characters in anything but a sympathetic light.
But overall, Auslander is an accomplished and polished debut. Most of the problems in the book are caused by the author’s desire to do too much rather than too little. Powell can create compelling characters (Queenie and Carol-Anne can be considered authorial triumphs), and she has a strong sense of detail. For her next effort, it would be interesting to see her focus on fewer characters so she can develop them as fully as her skill indicates she can.
This article appears in August 4 • 2000.