A Loving Daughter, Obsessed With Her Parents’ Misery, Seeks Its Roots

THIS STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY, by Claire Messud

“Maman and Papa had always talked about how much they loved Algiers, how much a part of them it was … the most beautiful city on earth.” So thinks 8-year-old François, a French diplomat’s kid who’s lived all over, as he, his mother, little sister and aunt flee Europe ahead of the invading German Army in 1940 to shelter with relatives in Algeria, his family’s homeland but one new to him.

Readers of Claire Messud’s other superbly written novels will recognize the agile precision of her prose in her newest one, “This Strange Eventful History,” and some will nod at the mention of North Africa. A French household with Algerian roots is at the center of her second novel, “The Last Life” (1999), and tales of the pied-noir branch of her family are folded into her essays on Albert Camus in “Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write” (2020).

After a prologue citing her new novel’s sources in her own family history, the narrative moves along from 1940 to 2010, across three generations and five points of view, channeling the intimacy of fiction. We begin with young François in 1940, dutifully trying to watch over his whiny little sister, and then get a chapter with a more well-informed set of worries from his father, Gaston, a naval attaché who’s being sent to Beirut (still under French control) and is desolate in wartime without his wife. The book then leaps ahead 13 years to François’s arrival at an American college. Each section is absorbing, and the leap has our attention; we want to know who François turns out to be.

Family members keep relocating across the globe — Buenos Aires, Sydney, the French Mediterranean coast, Connecticut — and their thoughts (largely unspoken) are filled with disappointments, bearable and unbearable. Denise, François’s fragile sister, is elated by an intense crush and then gutted by it. Barbara, the Canadian wife François loves but never quite understands, mocks her own failure to be a Frenchwoman and hates hosting her in-laws — “three-course meals, the linen napkins, the bloody siesta, the rituals as ineluctable as Catholic Mass. The agony of it.” Gaston, the family patriarch, knows by the time he’s in his 50s that “the world had transformed around him, and he couldn’t seem to adapt.” His granddaughter, Chloe, who, we’re led to think, grows up to be the writer of this saga, watches her parents with rueful love — “I felt the burden of their misery like a magnet at once drawing me home.”

As the book moves over seven decades, our sympathies are dispersed — no single character owns the story and no one crisis governs the plot; our eye is on the group. It’s a risky but solid structure, ambitiously packed with material. What’s striking is the way Messud manages to let time’s passage itself supply great feeling.