The Condition by Jennifer Haigh

I received this book by agreeing to attend a dial-in book club discussion with the author. I like to think that this is the beginning of my semi-professional career in book reviews!

The Condition is about a family whose youngest child Gwen has a condition called Turner Syndrome; this condition means she does not physically age past early adolescence though mentally she keeps maturing. One section of the book takes place just before the family notices that Gwen has this condition, and the rest takes place twenty years later. There are several flashbacks as well, filling in much of the interim time.

I was not immediately drawn in by this book. I thought the first section contained several trite characters that were not well-developed and that relied on well-known stereotypes to establish their personalities. As the book progressed, however, I became more impressed by the writing and the character development. The book is really a series of vignettes about each of the characters, many of them unrelated, that loosely intertwine around a current crisis to form a narrative story. However, I was most swept up in the book during the back-history around each character, rather than during the current story.

At first I thought of Hamilton's When Madeline Was Young would be a good book to compare this one to, WMWY's addressing a family's coping with an adult who doesn't age mentally, but they turned out to have little in common. I did find some recent reads to compare it to though: lately I have come upon several books where I was fooled by who the protagonist is. If I remember my 7th grade literary terms correctly, the protagonist is the character who changes. In both The Gathering and The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, the protagonist was not who I expected it to be. What I liked most about this book was that, uniquely, the protagonist was the family unit, not any single individual character. While individual characters did change through the book, it was how the entire family operated that really transformed through the narrative.

I ended up really enjoying the book and I am looking forward to the discussion with Jennifer Haigh. My only regret is that I read it a week before a visit to Martha's Vineyard, not realizing ahead of time that its Cape Cod setting would have been a good choice while on the Island.