The Guilting of the Liberals

Harry Stecopoulos reviews Adam Haslett’s new novel “Mothers and Sons.”

By Harry StecopoulosFebruary 19, 2025

• Fiction

THE BACK COVER DESCRIPTION of Adam Haslett’s Mothers and Sons places the novel squarely in the genre of realism centered on an unresolved trauma. This work, we’re told, is “an enthralling story about family, forgiveness, and how one act that can never be undone will change you forever.” True enough. Mothers and Sons is to some degree an affecting bourgeois novel of the sort that looms large in our contemporary literary culture. But this promotional verbiage ignores another equally important dimension of Haslett’s novel: his attempt to link queer sexuality and its familial ramifications to the pressing issue of immigration.

Haslett’s first instinct is to explore how queer desire emerges from—and in turn transforms—the heteronormative nuclear family. Whether depicting Peter Fischer, the gay protagonist, and his complicated relationship with his parents, or Ann, Peter’s mother, and her vexed attitude toward her husband and son, Haslett offers his reader a beautifully written account of the place of sexuality in family life and, conversely, the role of family in the making of sexual identity. Mothers and Sons is the work of a superb craftsman at the top of his game.

Yet Haslett also employs questions of immigration, asylum, and citizenship to complicate the well-worked thematic territory of family crisis—see, for example, his 2016 novel Imagine Me Gone, a Pulitzer finalist. In Mothers and Sons, Haslett pushes beyond his narrative comfort zone of affluent white America to the stories of Asian, Balkan, and Central American asylum seekers. If Mothers and Sons is about “one act that can never be undone”—about a past secret that haunts the present—it also seeks to honor the traumatic experiences of the foreign-born clients whom Peter represents in court. The anxiety over belonging that is so pivotal to Peter’s sexual and familial identity finds its global echo in the fear of asylum seekers desperate to find a new home.

Mothers and Sons doesn’t completely succeed in this endeavor. Haslett’s representation of bourgeois family dynamics tends to subsume and limit his engagement with issues of social and political belonging. Yet if Haslett fails to write a political novel—what Irving Howe famously defined as “a novel in which political ideas play a dominant role or in which the political milieu is the dominant setting”—he deserves our respect for trying to push beyond the limited problematics of so much contemporary US fiction. As in his first novel, Union Atlantic (2009), which allegorized the greed of the 2008–09 financial crisis through the depiction of a property-line dispute, Haslett struggles to tease from an individual character’s problems a new perspective on complex global phenomena. From beginning to end, Mothers and Sons wrestles with the challenge of the world elsewhere.

The novel chronicles the life of Peter Fischer, a gay immigration lawyer from a comfortable white family originally based in the Boston area. Peter’s Republican father Richard owns a small lighting fixture company; his mother Ann is a left-leaning Protestant minister who co-founds a feminist “intentional community” in Vermont after coming out as a lesbian. Peter’s adolescence, structured by the discovery of his own homosexuality, grows more complicated by his parents’ separation. Descended from General Daniel Brodhead, a hero of the Revolutionary War and a killer of Indigenous peoples, Peter understands his psychological and emotional suffering as being linked to a family legacy of violence. Perhaps this is why, like his mother, Peter wants to make a difference in the world. As Peter explains to one of his clients, he was raised with the credo “Don’t think of yourself, think of others.”

Liz, Peter’s sister, upbraids him for failing to live up to this ideal, indicting him for refusing to visit their mother in Vermont and for generally behaving in a self-absorbed manner. Peter resists this assessment, but the novel bears out some of Liz’s critique, particularly when it comes to Peter’s legal practice. Preoccupied with a traumatic episode from his past, he admits over the course of the novel that his advocacy for undocumented immigrants may have a narcissistic dimension. When Peter’s first client, Tesfay Kidane, an Eritrean Marxist intellectual, asks him, “[W]hy do you do this work at all? What am I to you?” Peter has no answer. Other than following in his mother’s footsteps—Ann often decried US-backed militarism in Central America—Peter finds it hard to tell others why he works as an immigration attorney. Obligated to learn about his clients’ lives before he represents them in court, Peter cannot fathom these relationships without turning back to himself and his difficulties with interpersonal bonds. “It is weird, of course—projecting myself into one life after another, intimacy without intimacy,” he writes at one point, a line that recalls the passing pleasures of meaningless hookups more than it does the geopolitical complexities of immigration law. For Peter, interviews with asylum seekers from Honduras, China, Nepal, Albania, and other distant nations are fleeting experiences of alterity that provide a discomfiting reminder of how he and his intermittent lover Cliff are nothing more than “strangers.”

But interpersonal connection has unpredictable and kinetic power in Mothers and Sons, and Haslett demonstrates repeatedly that Peter finds it hard to maintain the prophylactic detachment that informs both his legal practice and his sexual experience. Almost from the outset, Haslett draws a parallel between intimate knowledge of an immigrant’s life and sexual intimacy with another man. When Peter notes that the chairs in the courtroom waiting area resemble the drab furniture of his high school cafeteria, this mnemonic trigger—the grim antithesis of Proust’s madeleine—leads Peter to remember “Jared, the boy I loved, who I have not thought of in I don’t know how long.” The perfectly phrased awkwardness of “not thought of in I don’t know how long” captures the importance of this scene. In one wrenching moment, Peter’s legal work returns him to long-repressed memories of his high school lover, and suddenly, painfully, the sprawling diversity of the world’s asylum seekers shrinks to the scale of a homogeneous New England suburb.

Haslett further develops this theme by introducing the character of Vasel Marku, a gay 21-year-old Albanian seeking refuge in the United States. Peter’s colleague Monica urges him to represent Vasel because of their shared homosexuality. Similarly, as a Nicaraguan, she feels compelled to work with Central Americans terrified of losing their legal status in the United States. Identitarian solidarity informs her work as an immigration attorney. For Peter, however, queerness doesn’t constitute a firm basis for bonding, and he finds it difficult to connect with his Albanian client. Young and uncouth, Vasel is, for all his putative whiteness and Europeanness, far stranger than asylum seekers from the Global South. Haslett depicts rural Albania, Vasel’s point of origin, as an alien land where centuries of xenophobic intolerance and decades of communist totalitarianism have created a society in which homosexuality is understood as a shameful crime. In this strange nation, far removed from Peter’s liberal New York City, queerness unmakes lives and undoes community. Vasel’s experience of being observed having sex with a man by his brother eliminates their sister’s chances at a good marriage and destroys the family’s local reputation. The father responds by attempting filicide. Drunk and distraught, he aims a rifle at Vasel until his wife intervenes, saving her son.

By linking the challenge of queer identity to the crisis of national asylum, Haslett raises the stakes of his novel, pushing the limits of 21st-century bourgeois realism into important new terrain. Yet this extraordinarily talented novelist doesn’t fulfill the promise of his ambitious vision. Instead of allowing the relationship between sexuality and citizenship, family and nation, to resonate loosely and richly across Mothers and Sons, Haslett retreats to the reassuring territory of a taut narrative structure. For much of the novel, he devotes his considerable aesthetic powers to connecting Peter’s sexuality to his representation of Vasel. Sometimes this connection is made explicit: at one point, the lawyer worries that he has compromised his professional ethics by desiring the young Albanian: “[I]t occurs to me now that I have been terrified all along—terrified that […] all my efforts on his behalf have been a disguise for appetite.” Here, practicing immigration law provides cover for desire, with Vasel potentially serving as the latest in what we’re led to believe is a string of unfulfilling and unmemorable sexual liaisons. The Albanian’s distinctiveness—his difference—blurs in the face of Peter’s inward turn.

But as the looming narrative presence of a traumatic secret might suggest, Haslett is more interested in how the connection between the asylum seeker and the queer lover resonates across time. In the last third of the narrative, he alternates between sections that represent Peter’s high school past with Jared and his present immigration work with Vasel. This braided approach invites the reader to link the high school romance with the contemporary legal case. In a kind of queer typology, Vasel recalls—and brings to psychological fruition—Peter’s memories of Jared.

The alternating sections urge other character parallels and temporal connections. Haslett links Peter’s past tensions with his homophobic father and Vasel’s recent near-fatal confrontation with his own. The word “father” may not appear in the novel’s title, but that absence stands in inverse proportion to the long shadow the paternal casts in these characters’ lives. Tellingly, Haslett has Vasel’s and Peter’s mothers rescue their respective sons from catastrophes linked directly or indirectly to their fathers: death in the former case and legal jeopardy in the latter. By the end of the novel, Haslett has collapsed the queer crisis of a New England high school past and the homophobic terror of a rural Albanian present into a greater explication of Peter’s character. The tight bonds across space and time constrict and delimit the meaning of this potentially brilliant literary work.

Haslett, for all his remarkable talent, is much like his character. Peter tells his clients’ stories to the court just as Haslett shares their stories with us. And like Peter, Haslett gives his reader a sense of intimate knowledge without deep connection when describing these minor characters’ experiences in violent societies overseas. Thus, Haslett has Peter narrate the troubling story of Sandra Moya, a Honduran woman whose brother was killed by a criminal gang, but Haslett never gives Sandra the chance to share her own story. We are reliant on Peter’s perspective throughout. A similar structure prevails with Vasel, if in a more complicated and sustained manner. Peter finds it hard to convince the young Albanian to share his story, and when Vasel does, providing the horrific details of homophobic violence, Peter cannot honor his interlocutor’s narrative but instead almost immediately begins turning back to his own experience. Why not allow these characters to share their stories in the first person? Or why not give an omniscient third-person narrator access to their stories? As Anna Kornbluh has recently argued in Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2023), the dominance of first-person narration in modern fiction—and particularly in contemporary autofiction—has made it more difficult to imagine a large and diverse world. By routing everything through his protagonist, Haslett ensures that these migrant characters’ experiences are reduced to—and absorbed into—Peter’s story. Little wonder, then, that at the end of the novel, Peter comes to an unsettling realization: “I had been trying, through their suffering, to reach my own.”

A similar type of self-absorption prevails in Ann’s feminist retreat. Early in the novel, Richard criticizes her for being too invested in the plight of distant communities. “[Y]ou care more about the fate of socialists half a hemisphere away than your husband’s livelihood,” he says to her, “but I guess that’s your job, to care more about strangers.” This indictment, while accurate, testifies as much to the distance integral to Ann’s political beliefs as it does to her disinterest in her husband’s factory. For Ann, like Peter, finds it difficult to empathize—to open herself up to—other people, particularly people who hail from very different circumstances. When Peter tries to imagine Monica, his Nicaraguan American colleague, at his mother’s retreat, the clash between Monica’s experience of totalitarian violence and the entitled rhetoric of self-forgiveness articulated in a Vermont meetinghouse seems glaring, if not absurd. In this novel, what Richard calls “the Guilting of the Liberals” isn’t only guilt over the depredations of US policy in the Reagan or Obama era but also guilt over the liberal compulsion to perpetually transform the world’s suffering into a means of exploring white bourgeois subjectivity. Haslett certainly recognizes this guilt and its effect on narrative, and, as Mothers and Sons demonstrates, he is still exploring different ways of diagnosing and representing it.