A Novel Explores What Happens When Adoption Means Maladaptation

IMMEDIATE FAMILY
By Ashley Nelson Levy

Ashley Nelson Levy’s debut novel begins: “Last night I told you that today might be hard for us.” The narrator is addressing her younger brother, Danny, on his wedding day. She seems irked by the commonplace familial obligations: composing a toast, helping to pick out the cake. The tone is brittle; the annoyances seem petty. Soon, “Immediate Family” opens out to reveal the years of sibling grievances informing these frosty opening scenes, although a central tension of the story lies in how much of the blame belongs to Danny and how much to his circumstances.

Danny was adopted from an orphanage in Thailand, where he slept in a room that held 50 children. When he joins the Larsen family, at age 3, he knows no English and very little Thai. He is malnourished. A toy truck confuses him. Soon, the tantrums start: “The sound of your pain had incredible range,” the narrator recalls. “It always seemed to be retuning itself, finding limitless ways to unsettle you, and us.” By junior high, Danny is targeted by bullies and getting into fistfights. He is labeled “angry.” Who, in his shoes, wouldn’t be?

Throughout “Immediate Family,” the narrator probes her identity as the older sister to a boy who confounds her, but also as the mother she longs to be. At the time of the wedding she has spent months undergoing fertility treatments, and her desire to reproduce — her willingness to subject herself to endless tests, drugs and interventions to create a child who is genetically related to her — is both mirror and counterpoint to her parents’ aching, yearslong quest to adopt Danny.

Given the narrator’s medical and family travails, the book’s general hum of infuriation is apt. But the most memorable passages in “Immediate Family” are the funny parts. These, too, are the moments when Danny is most three-dimensional: when he misses the chance to walk at his college graduation and instead stages a backyard ceremony, with the local newspaper substituting for a diploma. Or when he bashes up the family car and stops at McDonald’s in the dinged vehicle to get his dad a Happy Meal. When the book’s chronic exasperation gives way to affection and hilarity, it’s as if somebody has thrown all the windows open.

“Immediate Family” bills itself as a novel, but it is hard to place it as such. Though it is addressed to Danny, it is not an epistolary novel, nor does it have a formal conceit or a plot. It does not shift perspectives or do much to complicate the narrator’s account of events. There is no world-building, no tears in the space-time continuum. It reads like a long personal essay, with some of the tics of the genre, such as the semi-digested chunks of research that occasionally bob up: a few dutiful paragraphs on the history of transracial adoption, a list of Victorian novels that feature foundling children, a quotation from a PDF by the Child Welfare Information Gateway.

Children who grow up in severely emotionally deprived settings are often hard-wired for defiance and detachment. It is fiendishly difficult to reverse the conditioning of early neglect, which can result in impulsive, conscienceless behavior. Toward the end of “Immediate Family,” Danny begins stealing his parents’ credit card information to make outlandish purchases. He raises funds for a yearlong Christian mission trip, quits after three weeks and uses his donors’ money for a down payment on an apartment. For his sister, a painful choice presents itself. She can accept her brother for who he is, which is a form of giving up. Or she can continue to hope that he will change, which virtually guarantees her ongoing frustration and resentment — these are the emotions that dominate this book. But as anyone who’s ever had a family can attest, they are often inextricable from love.