New Novel From Hegi Blends Seamlessly

“The Vision of Emma Blau” by Ursula Hegi (Simon & Schuster, 400 pages, $25)

Early in Ursula Hegi’s 1994 novel, “Stones from the River,” the main character, Trudi Montag, receives a visit from her American cousin, Robert Blau. The German girl and the American boy are so entranced with their resemblance, notwithstanding Trudi’s dwarfism, that they stare somberly at their reflections in a mirror.

The scene reappears in Hegi’s dark new book, “The Vision of Emma Blau,” which follows Trudi’s American relatives over three generations and nearly a century. As Hitler’s Germany provided the backdrop for the earlier novel, the immigrant experience gives context to the companion book.

Hegi, an Eastern Washington University creative writing professor currently on leave, slights history this time in favor of exploring the human craving for intimacy, the rarity of satisfying love and the fear of no-holds-barred passion. Her characters long for connection, but continually find alienation.

Equally disturbing is the Blau family’s steady decline over the decades, a slide that seems inevitable because Hegi tells us early of impending rot that “starts beneath lush surfaces, spreading its sweet-nasty pulp, tainting memories and convictions.”

In the first 90 pages, Hegi gets Trudi’s Aunt Helene to the States and sets a breakneck pace for the rest of her story.

In 1894, the teenage Stefan Blau heeds the call of America and leaves his home in Burgdorf, a fictional German village that was the setting for both “Stones from the River” and an earlier Hegi work, “Floating in My Mother’s Palm.”

Stefan learns French cuisine from a Hungarian chef in a Manhattan restaurant, escapes a devastating fire, and relocates to New Hampshire. There he marries a banker’s daughter and realizes his vision of constructing a magnificent apartment building, which he names the Wasserburg.

The building blocks his neighbors’ view of Lake Winnipesaukee, but also inspires them to fix up their property and imagine prosperity for their town, “which lay around the curved shoreline of the lake like the arm of a woman, hugging it closely.” Filled with aspiration, Stefan writes home to his childhood friend, Helene Montag, that it’s the American way “to plan beyond the obvious.”

Heartbreak follows heartbreak as Stefan loses two wives to childbirth complications. He returns to Burgdorf to fetch Helene to raise his two children. It is through Helene that Hegi most deeply delves into her subject of unrequited longing.

While Stefan assimilated in America, Helene keened for passionate love and fixed her desire on her pen pal. Hegi sharpens this yearning through interior monologues of Helene’s sexual and romantic fantasies. By the time Helene marries Stefan, she has daydreamed their wedding so many times that the actual event makes her impatient.

But Stefan wants only a mother for his children, not a soulmate. And convinced that he bears the responsibility for his first wives’ deaths, he has vowed never again to conceive a child; “He would not kill another woman with his seed.”

This does not make for a fulfilling wedding night. But Helene eventually gets what she wants, and how she comes to bear Robert, Trudi Montag’s cousin, is one of the novel’s delicious surprises.

Robert grows up, marries a woman who can’t love him enough, and fathers two children of his own. By the entry of this second generation of German-Americans, the family suffers obsessions and compulsions enough to fill a psychiatrist’s diagnostic manual. The growing dysfunction parallels the clan’s erosion of German traits, the mangling of family folklore and the deterioration of the grand apartment building itself. The rotting building makes a bitter metaphor if it indeed represents Hegi’s judgment of the immigrant experience.

Helene’s friendship with building resident Pearl Bloom is one of the few satisfying relationships in the book. Through the years, the German woman and her Jewish friend retreat to the rooftop where they reveal their inner selves. On the rooftop late in their lives, “(t)hey took measure of one another with the secret recognition of conspirators who’d conjured themselves back into their youthful bodies, and they stretched their shoulders, their necks, and eased back into their chairs with a half-remembered litheness.”

I wished for more historic context in this novel. Hegi uses to good effect the anti-German sentiment that accompanied two world wars, she but ignores other events and movements. Though they live through interesting times, her characters take no notice of woman’s suffrage, the New Deal, the civil rights movement, Vietnam or Watergate. And while the novel gives details about birth control at the turn of the last century, it never mentions the Pill.

Maybe Hegi decided she had her hands full. The book tracks the lives of more than a dozen characters, and, to expedite her pacing, Hegi gives us the private thoughts of them all, not only Blau family members, but other dwellers of the claustrophobic Wasserburg. Characters’ thoughts appear in italics; the unsubtle technique can be cloying - as a voiceover on film can be. I wanted more restraint with this device. Also, Hegi’s exposition at times lacks finesse. (“`on’t forget that they’re both nearly thirty,”’ one character says to another as Hegi’s touch gets heavy.)

On the whole, the author’s poetry, her observation of character, and her collected details about German folklore, custom and superstition blend seamlessly. Hegi, whose bestselling “Stones from the River” was an Oprah’s Book Club choice, is in New York taking a deserved break from teaching. Writers and readers here miss having her in our midst.