I’m tempted to call “The Phoebe Variations” a came-of-age book.
Wisconsin writer Jane Hamilton’s eighth novel — the “A Map of the World” writer’s first since “The Excellent Lombards” in 2016 — is of a familiar type. It’s a summer-that-changed-everything story that focuses on Phoebe, who is 17, very dramatic, obsessed with “Jane Eyre,” frustrated with her mother Greta and eager for her life to begin, particularly if it does not include her do-gooding mom.
In some ways, that sounds more like an autobiographical/MFA thesis work you’d expect from a debut novelist. What separates “Phoebe” from that sort of book is that Hamilton, who is 68, writes from the perspective of an older woman looking back on things that happened in 1974 and finally understanding what they mean. At its best, “The Phoebe Variations” is a compassionate work in which Hamilton conveys pivotal events, acknowledging that the people involved in them have completely different viewpoints.
That’s especially true of the novel’s setpieces. One is the incident that gets everything started. Greta, who adopted Phoebe when she was an infant, insists on taking her daughter to visit the family she has never known: Phoebe’s birth mother and her husband and daughters.
On the visit, Phoebe learns secret details about her early days and is traumatized enough by the news that she moves out of her mom’s house and in with an unconventional family that she hopes won’t notice her because they have 14 kids. Greta is a bulldozer but we get why she would think the visit would be healthy for Phoebe at the same time we appreciate how mystified the birth mother’s family is by the intruders and how shocked Phoebe is to realize the story she’s been telling herself about her life for 17 years is untrue.
The other big scene occurs after Phoebe’s move, when some of the 14 siblings convince her to play a prank that variously horrifies and entertains people in her life and that climaxes (sorry) with her losing her virginity. The benefit of the way Hamilton writes this scene — from middle-aged remove, rather than from the perspective of someone within the confusing events — is that we understand what happens as a pivotal experience in which she makes gigantic mistakes but is present enough to learn from them.
It’s terrific stuff and, on a sentence-by-sentence basis, “The Phoebe Variations” is shimmering and beautiful. That’s especially true when it spins out variations on Mary Oliver’s famous poem, “The Summer Day,” about “your one wild and precious life” (the book’s title may come from those variations, or from Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” which piano-playing Phoebe describes as “the fruit of knowledge in the next Garden of Eden”).
The shape of “Phoebe Variations” can be off-putting, though. To be fair, this is also true of the “Goldberg Variations” but, instead of the calm rigor of that masterpiece, “Phoebe,” which is set in Wisconsin and Minnesota, occasionally loses its way. Sometimes, we’re not sure why Phoebe is sharing information with us or whether it’s adding up to anything.
