Hilda and Pearl

Accomplished poet, novelist (Field of Stars) and short-story writer (Great Wit) Mattison adds to her laurels with this quietly suspenseful, psychologically penetrating novel, which is both a perceptive study of adolescence and a dramatic exploration of family relationships. When 11-year-old Frances Levenson finds a pair of baby shoes hidden in her mother Hilda's bureau drawer, she begins to unravel a secret involving her parents, her aunt Pearl and her uncle Mike. Viewed partly through Frances's pre-adolescent consciousness and partly through flashbacks to the early years of the two couples' marriages in the 1930s, the novel also portrays a segment of American society: liberals (socialists, Communists) who supported the doomed anti-Franco forces in the Spanish Civil War, and who were themselves often victims of the McCarthy witch hunts two decades later. The sons of Jewish immigrants, Nathan, Frances's father, and Mike, his younger brother, are opposites: Nathan is an idealistic Brooklyn high-school English teacher with a burning social conscience; Mike, who has changed his surname to Lewis, is a pragmatic court stenographer contemptuous of Nathan's politics but also cowed by his brother's dignity. A seduction, a baby of disputed paternal parentage and a tragic death mark the shifts in family dynamics that paradoxically bring Hilda and Pearl closer, though one is a victim and makes a noble sacrifice and the other is a taker with magic charm. Mattison has a luminous ability to render a preteen's fantasy life and conversation with her peers, conveying Frances's confusion about adult behavior. But it is in depicting the title characters that Mattison excels, evoking in keenly observed prose the animosities, yearnings for intimacy and currents of sexual energy that run between them. Small fireworks of surprise detonate at intervals in this compelling narrative, related by Mattison with disarming simplicity and economy, and with gripping effect. (Feb.)