I read The Shades, the debut novel of Evgenia Citkowitz, in one sitting while I was supposed to be working on a very different project—and, days later, it’s still distracting me. The Shades packs the fictional Francis family’s total deterioration into a tense, slim volume. Engrossing as theirstory is, there are shades in it of Citkowitz’s own life always reminding the reader of her background: Her famous and famously difficult mother, the Irish heiress and comic novelist Lady Caroline Blackwood; her father, composer Israel Citkowitz; and her stepfather, the poet Robert Lowell.
Although the Francises are Londoners, much of The Shades takes place in their grand old Kentish country house. A year after their daughter Rachel’s death in a car accident, London gallerist Catherine and her luxury real estate broker husband Michael face their fundamental flaws from either side of a dividing wall built deep into their marriage. The title gains significance when we see how Michael and Catherine spent their first successful date—at Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, where she slipped into a sublime abstract state of appreciation and declared the centuries-old opera the most modern of all. “It isn’t about whether he was successful in bringing her back,” she insists to Michael, who thinks her meditation on modernity had to do with how Monteverdi altered the myth of Orpheus. “It’s that he went to get her at all.”
Their original brokenness, we come to learn, tethers to a loss less definite than their daughter’s death. And the story itself, sliding mysteriously among their two perspectives and that of their 16-year-old son Rowan, is really enclosed all along inside the same tight scene that opens the story: A girl has fallen from their roof. A tragedy, within a tragedy, within the restored Georgian estate where they’d intended to retire—which is more an all-seeing character of its own than simply a setting.
The girl is Keira Martin—vulnerable, “waifish” and “with acne-picked skin,” and barely older than Rachel was. She first appears in the muggy midst of Catherine’s mourning and asks to see Hamdean, saying her dancer mother and mostly absent rockstar father lived together there with her once. She seems at first a sort of surrogate daughter wandering in to give meaning to the unused rooms. Keira gives Catherine, a mother “who passes for competent but is in truth neglectful,” a second chance at nurturing. She claims to have come for a kind of closure. But she becomes a haunting figure herself, a burden whose significance to Catherine is more a symptom of dwelling too long in memory than a relief from mourning.
Citkowitz has orbited similar themes before. In screenplays, a brilliant 2010 short story collection Ether, and articles, she has explored the complexities of families—all with “domestic derangement of different kinds at their core.” But The Shades suggest a deeper revelation in how its family and their guest grapple with generational tensions. Catherine’s memories of her sometimes cruel but brilliant artist father and depressed paranoid mother surface in contrast to Michael’s flashes of his school teacher parents and the shameful contempt he felt for their goodness and simplicity.
Narration slides, organically, from Catherine’s secret relationship with another famous artist and the pagan potency of their visits to Sutton Hoo to the most finely wrought and realistic of all the perspectives: that of Catherine and Michael’s painfully self-aware and intensely pained precocious son who asks to go to a progressive boarding school in the months immediately after his sister’s death.
Rowan wants to be free from being molded by his parents’ stagnant sadness. He remembers Rachel, a brash and pretty tennis-playing teenager, more honestly—more critically—than they can. His sessions with the school’s therapist are darkly funny, and his commitment to a charismatic science teacher’s ecological obsessions is an entirely believable outlet for his frustrations. When he announces to his father that he’ll quit school and use his and his late sister’s inheritance from their artist grandfather to fund his environmental activism, it’s an impossible absolution he’s chasing.
His character is the novel’s most haunting creation. Rowan wants to rail against an inevitable planetary death, hopelessly explaining to Michael that the earth has reached its “tipping point.” It’s a chilling analog for the novel’s central action and proof of Citkowitz’s power. What father and son don’t quite say to each other plays out in Catherine’s storyline: The death march under way in the Francis family is closer to completion.
