Review: 'Mothers, Fathers, and Others,' by Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt is one of America's great minds, and her intellectual and cultural commentary is sparkling. In "Mothers, Fathers, and Others: Essays," she engages readers in heady discussions while simultaneously telling entertaining tales about her Minnesota childhood.

Such is her range of knowledge — in one essay she refers to herself as an "intellectual vagabond" — that readers can anticipate scintillating discussions of subjects such as psychoanalytic theories, Plato, Bourdieu, Jane Austen and the Brontes. Hustvedt's enthusiasm for her subjects and the ease with which she discusses them make it a delight to plunge into the deep end of a subject previously unknown to the reader.

But the book begins with a memoir of Hustvedt's childhood in Northfield, Minn., especially in the stories she learned from her parents. Her mother was born in Norway and was a teenager in 1940 when the Nazis invaded, and her father was the grandson of Norwegian immigrants who taught Norwegian language and literature at St. Olaf College. In the essays about her family, some of the intellectual themes of Hustvedt's work are explored on a personal level. Among these are one that comes up continually throughout the collection: What is a border and what makes people uncomfortable with breaches of those borders?

Hustvedt argues that the disciplinary borders constructed to separate fields such as biology, history or psychology allow deep study of those fields, but then also separate scholars through the required vocabulary of each field. As these fields have become more specialized, she argues that their different languages keep them from speaking to one another, and thus prevent the sharing of knowledge.

Hustvedt says that being a writer means that she must cross these boundaries in order to create her work. Fiction concerns itself with human behavior, and to understand human behavior is to explore subjects — philosophy to genetics — that posit theories of who we are.

Gender underlies a number of the essays. Humans have constructed borders that determine one's sexual and gender identity. Those borders created systems of power, and in our current day, some of America's most virulent discussions occur around those boundaries. Hustvedt is brilliant at exploring how our various reactions to disrupting boundaries plays out in notions of the monstrous, the chimerical, and their perceived threat.

And perception is not the same as the sensory experience of "seeing." "Perception is founded on past experience," Hustvedt writes, "and that past includes our various cultures and languages and metaphors and categories for this or that, our particular knowledge about many subjects, our early childhoods with our families, and the hurtful and happy feelings that accompany those childhoods that are written into our bodies with brains in them and are crucial to determining our perception of and responses to various people, objects, and events that come our way. We divide. We make borders. We classify. And those divisions, borders, and classifications are often unconscious."

On rare occasions, Hustvedt reveals her own blind spots when it comes to perception. In several essays, she does a tremendous reading of language, translation and conscious thought. The languages, for the most part, were transmitted orally or in written text. I found myself wondering how some of her conclusions might have shifted with the incorporation of languages like ASL, that rely on a variety of body clues to convey meaning.

I imagine it would make a fascinating topic at Hustvedt's next fascinating salon.

Lorraine Berry is a writer and editor in Oregon.

Mothers, Fathers, and Others: Essays

By: Siri Hustvedt.

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 304 pages, $26.