Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on March 12, 2013
The best stories illustrating the hardship and suffering of war are personal, and that's how All the Light There Was begins. For Maral Pegorian's family in occupied Paris, the war is about hunger, curfews and boredom. When Maral's Jewish neighbors are being rounded up by Germans, Maral's family -- survivors of the Armenian Genocide -- hide a neighbor's baby. Similar scenes have been written many times before, and this one highlights the problem with the Nancy Kricorian's novel: for the most part, Maral is nothing more than an observer describing events from which she often seems distant. When the war finally has a predictable impact on Maral's life, it does so in a way that seems forced.
The members of Maral's family are familiar: the sullen, proverb-spouting father, the tearful/fearful mother, the spinster aunt, the reckless brother. In her desire to illustrate the importance of family in Armenian culture, Kricorian gives scant attention to the individuality of family members. Each member plays a defined role but no member behaves in a surprising or unexpected way. They give each other hope, and Kricorian's point seems to be that families exist for that purpose. It's a valid point, but again, a point that has been made many times in similar ways.
What Maral knows of the war, or for that matter of her boyfriend's fate when he is captured after playing a murky role in the French Resistance, comes from her brother Missak, whose role in the novel is to disappear for awhile and then reappear with a news bulletin. The novel might have been more engrossing if it had been built around Missak, who at least seems to know what's going on around him. Maral spends quite a bit of the novel worrying about her hairstyle which, regardless of the importance of her hair to her heritage, makes for less than riveting fiction.
The romance between Maral and her boyfriend is based on predictable scenes: walks in the park, initials carved into a tree, the tentative first kiss, Maral writing variations of her (anticipated) married name in her notebook. The scenes are written in fine prose but they're unimaginative.
Of greater interest is the response in the Armenian community to Armenians who play different roles in the war. Some join the French Resistance; some of those are apprehended and executed. Some, formerly in the Soviet Army and captured by the Germans, join the Wehrmacht (at the urging of an Armenian war hero) as an alternative to the starvation of POW camps. For their families, the question that arises is not easily answered: Is it better to die as a martyr or to survive as a coward? And then, when Paris is finally liberated, Armenian-American soldiers appear and everyone eats lamb and drinks raki in celebration. I expected more to be made of the theme of conflicting Armenian roles in the war -- the most interesting in the novel, I thought -- but it isn't well developed.
Instead, the novel's drama (such as it is) stems from the various Armenian suitors who woo Maral and the choice she must make among them. Once again, the novel follows a plotline that is all too familiar. Since the suitors are virtually indistinguishable from one another, Kricorian gave me no reason to cheer for any of them or to care about the choice that Maral ultimately makes. Her disappointingly banal insights about the need to sacrifice "true love" for "duty" are just as unoriginal as the story, which ends with chapters that are both contrived and dull.
Kricorian is a capable writer. Her prose is graceful and occasionally she crafts a scene that's quite touching. Her insights into Armenian culture are interesting. Unfortunately, much of the story she tells is not.
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