Beginning a Claire Messud novel is like beginning a journey: coat on, suitcase in hand, you reach for the door and turn the knob, knowing you’ll be profoundly changed by the time you return. As I began Messud’s latest novel, This Strange Eventful History, the feeling was the same, though having gained by now some wisdom from previous experiences, I had the sense this time to bring a bigger suitcase, as it were, to fit more souvenirs. Here is a book to savor, to slow down to, to mark up and reread. Like in traveling, when we can feel more attuned to the present moment but feel the insistent tug of excitement (or apprehension?) for what will come next, This Strange Eventful History presents a lush space to explore—to be able to luxuriate in a single paragraph or chapter while sensing the bigger story at hand, then discovering, sometimes from different vantage points, how the micro connects to the macro, is a lasting gift.
Messud is the recipient of the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the author of eight other books including The Emperor’s Children, which was longlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. This Strange Eventful History, a sweeping family saga spanning seventy years, is possibly her most autobiographical work yet, even compared to her essay collection Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write: An Autobiography in Essays. The novel centers around the Cassar family: Gaston and Lucienne, their children François and Denise, and François’s wife Barbara and their children Loulou and Chloe. Structured in seven parts, with a prologue, an interlude, and an epilogue, the story jumps in time and location chapter by chapter, starting in L’Arba, Algeria in 1940 and ending in Connecticut in 2010. Though every chapter is intimately infused with aching, complicated emotion, the chapters told from Chloe’s perspective are first-person. Like Chloe, Messud’s father was French and her mother Canadian, and she grew up in Australia, Canada, and the United States. In the novel, Chloe comes across her aunt’s diary and discovers new depths to Denise’s life and longings; she also becomes the recipient of her grandfather Gaston’s great literary work, an encyclopedic, handwritten tome of family history. Messud’s own grandfather self-published his memoir in the 1970s and gave out copies to the family. She was inspired by his war experiences, and as Messud told Erin Vanderhoof recently in Vanity Fair, “At first I thought I could just do something that was based on these stories, just about him. Then I realized there was just a lot more I wanted to try to do, and that somehow I was really interested in the distance between there and here.”
That distance, Messud proves, can’t be measured solely from Point A to Point B. She jumps around in her storytelling in a way that feels much more organic and true to real life; that the ride feels controlled and smooth proves how masterful she is in her craft. Death, for example, is addressed in a surprisingly direct way—of course the characters die, because we cover so much time in this book, but also because, simply, we all die. By addressing death in such a straightforward manner, Messud shifts some of the importance of death back to life; yes, this person dies this way, okay, and now we can redirect our attention back to this person’s life. For example, in a moment from 1963 in Geneva, years before the mentioned deaths occur, François returns home alone while Barbara is in Toronto tending to her dying father. He drinks despondently and laments the evening’s professional event, having failed to make a meaningful impression on the writer Raymond Aron, someone revered by his father—which is to say, he has once again proven himself a failure. In his sorrow, he thinks about the dinner he recently had with his friend Larry Riley and his wife Babs, and how beloved and confident he felt in their presence:
Riley, who would never see him crushed that way, wouldn’t have understood if he did (“What’s got you down, Frank? Chin up, life’s beautiful!” he’d say), and François was glad of it, really.
But what Riley did see he accepted and appreciated. Just like that. …A true friend. For almost fifty years, across continents and through joys and tragedies (oh, when Larry’s boy David died in a sailing accident…), Larry Riley would remain his closest and truest friend. What could a conversation with Raymond Aron matter in comparison to a conversation with Riley, of which François was granted so many?
And as if the divine would bind them only ever closer to the end, Riley would share with Barb the awful fate of Lewy body dementia, both these beloved humans turned practically to stone, their minds still moving incommunicably behind the frozen statues of their bedridden bodies. François would not—could not—stay to witness this in its entirety—he could not bring himself to visit Larry in Ottawa after he could no longer speak…but he knew, as he knew from Barb’s neurologist in Greenwich, what lay in store, for his friend as for his own wife, the unbearable loss of it all. Riley would die just three months and ten days after François, and Barb, though still animate, could not understand what had happened to either of them, nor what it meant both men, long lapsed in faith, suspended between belief and unbelief, hoping still to share some laughter in the afterlife.
To in this way transcend death, Messud shifts her attention to the process of and ceremony around dying, which has more to do with living. So, too, she examines what it means to have family, purpose, identity. She explores the many ways of survival. For the Cassar family, with its French Algerian, pieds-noirs roots, connected deeply to a land that ceased to exist, no longer quite fitting into one country or another, the questions are also: What is home? What is success? How do you preserve and respect your culture, your heritage, your history, all that makes you singular while simultaneously connecting you to more universal themes of life as a human being on this planet?
Frank Bruni writes in “Claire Messud Looks Back on Life, and the Art That Shaped Her” that Messud’s international upbringing “affords her a panoramic perch” from which she’s able to see near and far, a sort of separation or distancing that invites unique observation. “Messud makes the point that every relationship we’ve had and every residence that we’ve inhabited survives in the scrapbooks that constitute ourselves: We leave them far behind and never leave them at all. …That’s why Messud writes. It gives the past a future.”
And in doing so, especially in this novel, Messud’s writing becomes timeless. Chloe, as her education expands and her curiosity about the world and her own history grows, questions colonialism, capitalism, globalism. She decides she wants to be a writer. It’s a career others in her family, including her grandfather and father, deeply wished to pursue. A triumph, then, and proof that the sacrifices her family made—in particular those of her grandfather and father—were not in vain. Proof, too, that who we are is a combination of others, and that dreams can still come true, if down the genetic road. Perhaps emphasizing Chloe in this book is some kind of thank-you to Messud’s own family? Crossing the English Channel in 1989 with her boyfriend Oliver, Chloe thinks about Salman Rushdie, religion, and the metaphors transportation offers:
How turbulent might the crossing prove? Each of us carried to the shore by all that had come before, then launched upon the wide, dark ocean. Look carefully, I thought. …Look at all the others with whom you share the boat. Beyond the most immediate, you can’t choose your companions for a crossing or a generation. You can’t know the weather in store, the size of the waves. All in this strange eventful history is uncertain.
At least, then, we have such beauty as Messud’s novel, a more permanent form than so many others, to relish and enjoy.
FICTION
This Strange Eventful History: A Novel
By Claire Messud
W. W. Norton & Company
Published May 14, 2024
