Father of the Four Passages by Lois-Ann Yamanaka

Sonny Boy, a painter cannot paint, sculptor sculpt, photographer photograph, musician compose, not without the experience; your birth was to enhance my art. Art enhanced. Now how do I get rid of you? All evidence of you. Everything. I should kill you. Artfully, I've done it before. What a requiem I would compose.

Sonny Boy, I had to birth you. I thought you were the blessing of a uterine lining, gone for what they all told me was forever. The possibility of my redemption, a miracle from God, who found me at last.

Sonia Kurisu is an art student and lounge singer living in Las Vegas who has just given birth to her first son, Solomon--Sonny Boy. Sonny Boy is technically her first, but she is haunted by the spirits of three boys she killed before they were born: one appearing as pieces chopped up on a doctor's table, another as a drug-malformed "turtle boy," and another as he was buried, in a jar. Sonny Boy himself is no picnic, becoming another burden in a life of drugs and abuse that Sonia struggles to get away from. When he turns out to be severely autistic, nearly non-verbal, Sonia's family members converge upon her, dragging her back to Hawaii, and not always with kindness. Sonia struggles to love her deadbeat mother, her born-again sister, her meddling grandmother and aunt. Her connection is with her father, who sends lyrical letters from whatever part of the world--Japan, Nepal, Argentina--he happens to be visiting. His quasi-abandonment, of course, informs Sonia's fantasies of getting rid of Sonny Boy for good.

I have a high regard for Yamanaka's work. I thought Blu's Hanging was a near-masterpiece, and although I didn't like Wild Meat and Bully Burgers as much, its final scenes have stayed with me for a long time. Father of the Four Passages, in fact, has a similar ending, in which Sonia is provoked by Sonny Boy--who has some sort of mystical powers to speak without speaking, it seems, though that's all a little bit muddled--to find restitution for the three dead children, including turning the baby-in-the-jar to ash on top of Mauna Kea. Father of the Four Passages differs from those other books in that its protagonist is an adult, not a child, and Yamanaka brings a much more poetic and staccato style to it, eschewing the earthy and pop-cultural aspects of those other two books. It's kind of a mess, and the end is supposed to bring it all back together by giving the various pieces of the book a kind of direction, toward atonement, restitution, healing. And that mostly works, but I did find the experience of reading Father of the Four Passages to be a much more whiplash-inducing experience, and though the story coheres, the book didn't necessarily cohere for me.