The novel 'Us Fools' searches for the meaning of a traumatic childhood

Bernie, the narrator of Nora Lange’s novel “Us Fools,” grows up on a farm in central Illinois in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but Bernie isn’t as interested in portraying the farm or the landscape as she is in portraying her family, especially her older sister, Joanne, who is smart, rebellious and disabled. According to Bernie, she and Joanne come from a long line of women who have been difficult to handle and have lived, in some ways, tragic lives. Lange’s style is complex and comic, which gives “Us Fools” an unusual feel: Do I laugh, sigh, endure and try to understand what’s happening?

Novels written in the first person can seem a bit self-centered, but Lange does a good job of exploring how Bernie tries to understand the complexity of her relatives and her relationship with each of them. It begins when Bernie is about to turn 9 and Joanne is 11. Her parents aren’t around, and Joanne decides to “jump off our roof,” which is about 25 feet above the concrete driveway. Bernie doesn’t stop her or run to find the parents. She thinks Joanne has more to teach her than anyone else, and whatever Joanne wants to do, she can’t be stopped. Bernie already knows that whatever Joanne does will reveal something new and fascinating to her (maybe to Joanne, too), and she writes of looking at Joanne hurt in the driveway: “I enjoyed it, even if I pretended I didn’t.”

Bernie's parents have a lot of problems to deal with. It's the late 1980s and the farm crisis is threatening everything they need. Bernie is only 7 years old when his worries become specific, but he knows that his father, Henry, and mother, Sylvia, are very worried. They know that debt, low production prices, and corporate greed could ruin the life they're used to, and as Bernie gets older, he realizes that his parents, especially his mother, were frantic at the time and didn't know how to handle the situation.

At one point, when Bernie is just 7, his mother tells him, referring to Joanne, “She’s your problem now.” Bernie believes his mother. The rest of the novel is an exploration of how Bernie’s perspectives on Joanne change over time. Bernie tries to help his sister, but also not be like her. As he grows older (he’s in his mid-30s when he’s sorting through his memories), he learns to see the bigger picture; one of the phrases Lange has Bernie use to describe herself and her sister is “trash girls.”

But Bernie’s parents are also a mystery to their children. In the third part of the novel, Lange writes: “I remember watching our parents beating each other up and wondering if my sister and I would ever find that kind of love, that absolute addiction. Sometimes our parents demanded that we go out to dinner or do chores. ‘That’s what flashlights are for,’ they would say, happily and disgustingly.”

Unfortunately, Bernie's detailed obsession with his own feelings creates a problem for the reader: Lange does not attempt to develop any analysis of how Bernie's parents came to be the way they are. He is content to attribute Sylvia's personality disorders to family history, but does not go into sufficient detail about the actual history to allow the reader to understand what Bernie does not understand.

Lange is interested in how Bernie manages to get her own life back together, and as you read the story, it becomes more and more compelling. She is very aware of her handicaps and the way Joanne influences her. The difference between Bernie and Joanne is that Bernie wants things to change, both socially and politically, but she also wants to figure out how to fit in and find some pleasures even if things don't change. Joanne is a rebel to the core, always expressing her feelings about her parents, or about where they live, or about what she sees as threats and opportunities, no matter how unusual or, from Bernie's point of view, cruel her feelings are.

Lange is from a younger generation than I am, and I think she does an excellent job of describing how hectic life has been for young people over the last 40 years. Can a young girl or a teenager deal with that, like Bernie does, or is it smarter for a young woman to move out to the middle of nowhere and escape it, like Joanne does?

The real pleasure of the book, once you get used to it, is the complexity of Lange's narrative style, the way she plays out the moment-by-moment passage of time in Bernie's life and portrays how she endures the hardships of learning to understand and survive the hand she's been dealt. Amused, sad, angry, pleased, scared, resigned – Bernie leaps from page to page and drags the reader along with her. For a debut novel, it's pretty remarkable.

Jane Smiley is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction.