The Condition

Summary (from the publisher): The Condition tells the story of the McKotches, a proper New England family that comes apart during one fateful summer. The year is 1976, and the family, Frank McKotch, an eminent scientist; his pedigreed wife, Paulette; and their three beautiful children has embarked on its annual vacation at the Captain's House, the grand old family retreat on Cape Cod. One day on the beach, Frank is struck by an image he cannot forget: his thirteen-year-old daughter, Gwen, strangely infantile in her child-sized bikini, standing a full head shorter than her younger cousin Charlotte. At that moment he knows a truth that he can never again unknown something is terribly wrong with his only daughter. The McKotch family will never be the same.

Twenty years after Gwen's diagnosis with Turner's syndrome, a genetic condition that has prevented her from maturing, trapping her forever in the body of a child, all five family members are still dealing with the fallout. Each believes himself crippled by some secret pathology; each feels responsible for the family's demise. Frank and Paulette are acrimoniously divorced. Billy, the eldest son, is dutiful but distant, a handsome Manhattan cardiologist with a life built on compromise. His brother, Scott, awakens from a pot-addled adolescence to a soul-killing job, a regrettable marriage, and a vinyl-sided tract house in the suburbs. And Gwen is silent and emotionally aloof, a bright, accomplished woman who spurns any interaction with those around her. She makes peace with the hermetic life she's constructed until, well into her thirties, she falls in love for the first time. And suddenly, once again, the family's world is tilted on its axis.

Compassionate yet unflinchingly honest, witty and almost painfully astute, The Condition explores the power of family mythologies, the self-delusions, denials, and inescapable truths that forever bind fathers and mothers and siblings.

 

Review: This novel opens in the summer of 1976, when the McKotch family: wife Paulette, husband Frank and children Billy, Gwen, and Scott travel to their family retreat on Cape Cod for their annual vacation. Yet this will be one of the last summers the family is together. Shortly afterwards, Gwen is diagnosed with Turner Syndrome and Paulette and Frank eventually divorce. The narrative quickly jumps to 1997 and 1998 to a very different - and very disjointed - family of five individuals living isolated and largely unhappy lives. Paulette is lonely and adrift without a spouse and disappointed in her children's failure to follow her structured idea of family and tradition. Frank is frustrated in his career in scientific research and similarly romantically adrift. Billy has isolated himself in the anonymity of New York City and hides his true life from his parents. Gwen, physically and emotionally stunted by Turner's Syndrome, has no social life and a dreary job in a tiny museum. And Scott is a lackluster teacher, unhappily living in the suburbs with his wife and two children with very little contact with his parents and siblings.

 

I admit that I was initially interested in reading this novel because I was curious about reading about a character suffering from Turner Syndrome. And the novel does spend time detailing Gwen's experiences from her perspective. "It wasn't as if something had happened to her, an accident or injury, an illness that struck overnight. [...] No. She'd been a child, normal, healthy. Then. Then nothing, not a single thing, had happened. Instead things had failed to happen" (160). Yet this is certainly not the sum of Gwen's experiences and certainly not the full explanation of the dissolution of Paulette and Frank's marriage and the splintering of their once unified family.

 

Instead, the condition referenced in the title is that of the family overall. The novel continually shifts in perspective, so all five members of the family are intimately examined by the reader and able to see them up close in a way that their fellow relatives cannot. No one in the family is particularly close to any of the others. For example, Frank wonders about his children, reflecting on Gwen by saying, "Even among family she was reserved and stubborn, prone to long silences. About her personal life she volunteered nothing. She maintained an air of strongly held opinions kept quiet" (41). Less than a family, the fractured McKotches feel like five individuals who just happen to have similar origins. In many ways, this novel reminded me of Before You Know Kindness by Chris Bohjalian. Both novels feature a family on their annual summer vacation that goes awry, splintering the family.

 

At times, this novel did feel long winded. It was deeply introspective to the point where little happened aside from each character's ponderings. However, the plot action did move the family closer together by a few degrees and towards greater happiness as individuals as well. This isn't a feel good story about a family that heals and erases all its flaws. But I think in the end, this family does end up happier, with deeper understandings of themselves as individuals and each other. This family is a work in progress, as all families are.

 

Stars: 3.5