Upstate by James Wood

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on June 5, 2018

Upstate is a family drama that focuses on a father’s sense of frustration because he feels unable to protect, or even to help, his two adult daughters, one of whom is particularly fragile. In the past, fathers passed the duty of protection to a daughter’s husband, but the fragile daughter’s boyfriend makes clear that he is not ready to accept that responsibility, nor is the paternalistic notion that women must be protected consistent with modern times. Where does that leave the father?

Alan Querry buys and develops properties in England. He gives the outward appearance of success, with a nice family home in Durham, but he’s having trouble paying his mother’s nursing home bills. He is 68 and the business to which he has devoted his life is in danger of failing.

Alan was a widower until he married Candace, who is ten years younger and not highly regarded by Alan’s two daughters. The fragile daughter, Vanessa, lives in Saratoga Springs, in upstate New York, where bodies unclench at the end of winter (presumably a metaphor for welcoming a new phase of life). Alan is planning to visit Vanessa because her boyfriend Josh emailed her sister Helen to say that Vanessa was depressed, withdrawing, and perhaps capable of self-harm. Alan, knowing Vanessa’s history, agrees to visit her with Helen, who visits the US regularly as a music producer for Sony, a job she is hoping to leave.

Helen believes that Vanessa is simply giving another of her “performances,” a view that is too uncharitable for Alan to hold (“I’d like to think that I don’t have a daughter who throws herself down the stairs because she damn well feels like it”). But the conflicts that face the family are deeper than Vanessa’s apparent depression, which seems to vanish when Alan and Helen arrive. For example, Alan’s uncertain finances lead to conflict with Helen, whose plans for a business start-up would benefit from Alan’s support.

Other family issues surround Vanessa’s boyfriend Josh, who strikes Alan as being overly smug, while Helen regards him as untrustworthy. Vanessa’s good spirits seem to depend on Josh’s presence, yet Vanessa is uncertain of her future with Josh, not just because of his apparent unwillingness to live with her in England, for which she increasingly longs, but because of the “smiling, weak, wary look” he gets when she tries to discuss any sort of future with him. Josh and Alan have an honest chat late in the novel that amplifies Alan’s concerns about Vanessa’s future.

Upstate offers a detailed exploration of the Querry family, their relationships and anxieties, their strengths and weaknesses. Vanessa’s intrusive Christian neighbor thinks she needs to be saved, and Vanessa is something of a mess at home, but in her classroom, lecturing on ethics in philosophy, discussing the difference (if one exists) between thinking and living, she is in complete control. At the same time, philosopher that she is, wondering whether life has any meaning beyond a continuation of existence has taken a toll on her, although she might be susceptible to having existential thoughts even if she had not pursued philosophy as a career. Happiness might just be an innate quality that some people have and other lack. That, at least, is one of the questions the novel poses.

Josh lives resolutely in the present, a trait that Vanessa philosophically admires in the abstract, but the novel asks us to question whether the self-help admonition to “live in the now” is suited to the maintenance of a relationship. Vanessa wants her father and sister to rescue her, while Helen’s judgmental (perhaps selfish) nature and her desire to live her own life conflict with her desire to help Vanessa. On top of that, Helen has her own marital difficulties.

All of that leaves Alan wondering what, if anything, he can do for his children now they are no longer living under the protection of his roof. Upstate explores the parental anxiety that comes from watching adult children make decisions and confront problems over which the parent has no control. Parents can directly affect a young child’s happiness, but adult children, no longer dependent on parents for emotional wellbeing, present less predictable parenting challenges.

In elegant prose, the novel asks the reader to imagine what options Alan might have to improve not just his children’s lives, but his own. The novel also directs an observent eye to American customs as seen from the perspective of a traditionally reserved Englishman. There is not a misplaced word in this careful study of a small family's loss of the connections that might make it easier for them to cope with their individual problems.

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