GLR March-April 2023

above danger in a country that’s not their own, risking rabies and dismemberment. It’s harrowing despite how richly they de serve their scare. But failure was what really scared Flo. She exchanged possi ble failure as an artist and a woman’s lover for conclusive failure as a mother and a man’s wife. She has done everything but what really mattered and failed at every turn. She hopes that Riley will not reject his artistic vocation when that choice arrives for him. On Boston’s Storrow Drive, the signage long promoted the Charles River Park apartment complex with the message: “If you lived here ... you’d be home now.” Samuel doesn’t want to be home; his trip is “Sorrow’s Drive.” Anurse, Francis Grayson, has summoned him to settle his dead brother Peter’s affairs. So this will hurt as much as possible, Samuel drives cross-country to Boston, a Dantean descent into bleak midwinter, with motel beds and fast food to jump-start his penance. When Samuel left his family, he stopped communicating with them. A hysterical response to sex play between cousins underlies this estrangement, though there’s more. No one ever risked the conversation that might have yielded rapport, a truce, a clean break—something more declarative and decent than decades of guilty ghosting. Nurse Grayson wonders why Samuel abandoned dear old Peter, though eldercare workers know how families settle their scores against fading elders by abandonment. They’re surprised when it doesn’t happen. That’s straightforward enough. There’s something else that’s not, and that will mess with your head in ways you won’t see coming. Genuine startle factor is rare—harder to achieve than crude shock, and harder on the printed page than on film. It’s even harder with a book so clearly about justice rather than mercy, with an author who carries the scales in one soft, deft hand. Sorrow’s Drive reveals what’s in the other. ____________________________________________________ Laura Argiri is the author of Guilty Parties: Tales of Infatuation and Menace (2020).

The G&LR Board of Directors Mourns the passing of our friend and colleague Don Eldridge Gorton III Founding Member and Secretary of The G&LR Board of Directors, 1998–2022

How Bad Were the ’50s?

J EAN R OBERTA

KEEPING FAMILY SECRETS Shame and Silence in Memoirs from the 1950s by Margaret K. Nelson NYU Press. 256 pages, $30. I N HER INTRODUCTION to Keeping Family Secrets , Margaret K. Nelson defines “family secrets” as “informa tion that family members seek to conceal from each other or from outsiders because to do otherwise would risk eliciting not only embarrassment or minor discomfort, but also pro found shame and, on some occasions, material hardship or even danger.” This is deep stuff. Nelson distinguishes “family secrets” from a general tendency to sanitize one’s public image. Her focus is on a decade known for its obsession with secrets: the 1950s, the era of McCarthyism, witch hunts for Communists and homosexuals, and the triumph of the isolated

Don Gorton (1960–2022)

March–April 2023

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