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‘Bug Hollow' perfectly captures the unpredictability of life

Don't be fooled by Michelle Huneven's warm welcome. She can be just as capricious and brutal as real life. Her new novel, 'Bug Hollow,' begins with a perfectly calibrated bit of domestic comedy set during a golden summer in the mid-1970s. Ellis Samuelson — the sweetest, smartest son any parents could ask for — has just graduated from high school and driven off on a week-long road trip with some buddies. The first intimations of trouble start dripping in when his friends come home and report, 'Ellis decided to stay away for a few more days.' Apparently, he met 'some girl' on a beach near Santa Cruz. More time slips by. Ellis doesn't return for his job as a camp counselor, but a few postcards suggest he's having a blast working at an ice cream parlor. 'I'm extremely happy here,' he writes, 'so please don't worry.' Yeah, right. 'I knew we shouldn't have let him go off like that,' his mother, Sib, says. 'One fast girl on a beach and he's a goner!' A straight-A kid with a full scholarship to Ole Miss: What if he doesn't come back in time for college? 'Something's fishy.' 'I'm sure he's fine,' his father says. 'It's high time he gave us something to worry about.' Not to be dissuaded, once Sib learns Ellis is camped out at a place called Bug Hollow in Boulder Creek, she throws everybody — the dog, too! — into their VW van, and they barrel off to retrieve the wayward son. 'He won't have a choice,' Sib says. 'We'll play it by ear,' Dad predicts. Teenagers! Huneven knows just how to seduce us with this family's adventures. We recognize their high jinks — the goofy, good-looking kid, the sharp-eyed mom, that easygoing dad. This is practically an episode of 'The Brady Bunch' written by Anne Tyler. The whole chapter is honey glazed in good humor, the passions of youth and the histrionics of loving parents. But then, with no more movement than the turn of a phrase or the slip of a knife, the Samuelson family suffers a gutting loss from which they will never move on. Except, of course, they do move on because that's time's cruel and blessed effect on grief. With extraordinary candor and tenderness, Huneven shuffles through those raw months when hope feels like a cheat as the Samuelsons are unmade and remade by tragedy. 'How weird life was, how absolute, how irremediable,' she writes. The important thing is to resist 'that sticky, toxic terror that life — this life, which gave you the beautiful sparkling world — squashed you like a gnat.' Sib, a prickly fourth-grade teacher who 'undercut any good, tender moment,' grows even sharper and more difficult in the fog of mourning. (Is that the smell of alcohol on her breath?) Cruelly, sorrow makes time with her children feel unbearable. Even driving home from the grocery store with 8-year-old Sally is a strain. 'Sib is about at the limit of what she can take of the girl,' Huneven writes. 'Those big eyes exaggerated by her glasses are so woozy and beseeching, they make Sib shrink back. Sib knows — they both know — that this is the time for her to check in, to ask how her daughter's doing. But Sib can't; she won't, she doesn't have it in her, whatever it is. She's all but holding her breath until they can go their separate ways.' And yet that sense of dread about being with her own children is transformed into zealous advocacy for the students in her classroom. How much safer it feels to care about somebody else's children. In the pages that follow, Huneven dares us to get comfortable only to yank us years or thousands of miles away. The family that initially felt so shiny and self-contained gives way to individual stories that butt up against one another at skewed angles. It's not confusing; it's eye-opening. The very structure of 'Bug Hollow' reminds us that the smoothly progressive chapters of most novels are a fanciful creation of some chiropractic narrator who's artificially aligned the disorder of actual lives. Here, the Samuelsons' fates play out in ways that feel preposterous and completely believable. In Saudi Arabia, we discover an entanglement that will complicate the family much later. A trip back to Bug Hollow doesn't offer the nostalgic closure some of them thought it would. One of the novel's finest stories slips away from the Samuelsons entirely to explore the surprising ways love can evolve. And in a particularly deft chapter of tragicomedy, we watch one of the central family members die. But, as always, Huneven reminds us, 'The world still ached with beauty.' Or at least it still does in this unassuming book written with such graceful compression. Right down to its final moments, Huneven casually offers up little revelations that crunch as sweet and tart as pomegranate seeds. 'Funny,' she writes, 'how the days you weep, you can also have the fullest, deepest laughs.' There are many such days here. Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post. He is the book critic for 'CBS Sunday Morning.' By Michelle Huneven Penguin Press. 288 pp. $29