A Grief Processed

Sharon Harrigan's Half is not for the faint of heart. Her debut novel, published by University of Wisconsin Press approaches, in stunning sparsity, the traditionally taboo subject of child abuse as it hinders—and aids—the blossoming adolescence of Artis and Paula, twins. Each a half of the other, they speak for and with one another, exhibited by Harrigan's cleverly executed utilization of the present plural. In no small feat, she documents the lives of the twins, from childhood to age thirty, and ushers the reader through the growing together of the twins and their eventual breakdown into individuality.

The novel, a finalist for the AWP novel prize, is based on Harrigan's short story, "Half" which won both the Cecilia Joyce Johnson Award from Key West Seminars and the Kinder Award from Pleaides Magazine. And although the novel is comparatively short at just 267 pages in larger font, no less than thirty years are given their due time. In staccato chapters (a chapter per year), each averaging about four pages, readers are thrust into the world of a rural Michigan home, one that is broken and twisted, one that scrounges for the light of an eighteenth birthday. The novel reads almost like connected short shorts, like picaresque anecdotes that take the reader into the harmonized minds of the twins, and as this synchronization breaks down, into the surprising differences hidden all along. Although the novel documents the physical and mental abuse of both Artis and Paula, Harrigan's language is riddled with magical realism and the overwhelming sense that there is something left unseen. This magic, although perhaps skewed by the characters who interpret it, both alleviates and heightens the density of Harrigan's subject matter, frustrating and exacerbating the mental instabilities of their father, the apathetic attitude of their mother who just can't find an escape, nor the willingness therein.

Lovingly known to all by "Moose," their father is an outdoorsman, a veteran, and a charlatan in respectable social circles. The novel opens at his funeral, the catalyst that unwinds the twins' memories as to how and why they were treated like little soldiers in their childhood. And, more importantly, they consider how their father's legacy, one so startling different in the home than in public, shaped their pubescence and gave rise to the strength that each harbor.

But, moreover, Harrigan's novel explores the idea of forgiveness, the idea that loss means pity, that memory is either aggravated or abated with time. In one sense, there is beauty in memory, the pockets of happiness that erase all the bad: "He told us we were divine. And, finally, we believed. We could lure and sway." But still there is the hurt that transcends reality. Harrigan, in alarming richness, expands on the divinity of Artis and Paula as they grow up, find partners and careers, have children and dreams.

We befriended rock stars and heroes. We didn't know what those words meant, but they sounded good. Some people used them to describe us. We shook our fingertips, and the sky expanded with storm, just like Dad had taught us, though we never admitted he had. We flicked our wrists and lightening flickered. We harnessed the power into our guitars and guns.

The twins are brought up to believe themselves to be more than human, if not only for their own merits, but for the delusions of a Zeus-like father, a man able to wield lightning bolts against those who cast doubt. But the debate over what constitutes a "good" father is not one-dimensional. Despite trauma—a cyclical, inherited force—Artis and Paula must decide what to remember and what to discard. The human mind is perhaps not able to remember it all.

In a Q&A with Sharon Harrigan, available to view on her website (www.sharonharrigan.net), she mentions that the idea for this novel sprung from her own traumatic familial experiences. As a child, her father, like Moose, was an avid hunter. However...