THE PROMISED WORLD
Lisa Tucker
Atria
Fiction
ISBN: 9781416575382
In her previous books, Lisa Tucker has brilliantly explored the often under-investigated, surprisingly complex relationships between brothers and sisters. In THE PROMISED WORLD, her fifth novel, Tucker makes an even more focused foray into this sibling relationship, using her trademark sensitivity and intensity to examine one family’s history.
Billy and Lila Cole are twins, and they’ve grown up sharing the kind of indelible bond that characterizes many twin relationships. They bond over their shared love of story; Billy loves writing stories and Lila loves reading them. In Billy and Lila’s case, however, their link is even more intense out of necessity, as the two grew up in a cruel, abusive household and only escaped by depending on each other. Lila has forgotten nearly everything about the scary, troubling years of her childhood and adolescence, relying on the limited things Billy has told her about those times.
As for Billy, he has envisioned his and his sister’s lives as a grand narrative, a journey from experience to innocence, from complexity to simplicity. Lila’s life as an adult would seem to have written the happy ending to Billy’s story --- she has been married to a loving but uncomplicated man for 11 years and has a successful career as a literature professor. Billy, though, has seen his life as a series of disappointments, after he accidentally impregnated a woman he didn’t love and married her. His and Ashley’s three children have brought him joy, but his ongoing attempts to capture the sense of wonder and magic that were missing from his own childhood are frustrated by the demands of reality and by Billy’s own depression, anger and paranoia.
When Billy commits suicide, Lila completely falls apart, her despondency confusing and angering her husband, who starts to question the appropriateness of the twins’ relationship. When Billy’s two older children, desperate to avoid moving away with their mother and her new boyfriend, try to reconnect with their aunt, Lila must try to reconstruct the traumatic events of her childhood in the hopes that Pearl and William will be able to avoid repeating them. Along the way, she begins to question the version of her life that Billy, a talented storyteller, has constructed as the truth.
Billy, whose death happens just before the opening of the novel, remains mostly a mystery, his life, fears and dreams conveyed to the reader (as they are to the other characters) mostly through the words and stories he has written. The other characters --- from Lila to her husband Patrick to Billy’s wife Ashley and his two children, Pearl and William --- all have the opportunity for exploration of their own motivations, sadness and misunderstandings, as the narrative rapidly shifts among a variety of perspectives. Tucker has shown herself adept at understanding and narrating the inner lives of children, and her portrayals of teenage Pearl and eight-year-old William are especially compelling.
Although THE PROMISED WORLD --- particularly the younger set of siblings’ desperate story --- has the potential to turn into melodrama near the end, Tucker generally manages to avoid this trap, resulting in a novel that contains emotional intensity and dark undercurrents without being weighed down by them.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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