Disobedience begins with a powerful moment of choice. One day seventeen-year-old Henry accidentally enters his mother’s e-mail password when starting his browser. He finds at least one message already waiting to be read. Here the choice he makes is almost by reflex. He reads the message and discovers that his mother is in the midst of an adulterous affair with a musician friend. The first ethical decision he faces is simple: Should he read a message not meant for him? An even more important ethical question is raised after he reads that first message. Now he has crossed a moral divide. Should he continue to read the messages, though? This quandary triggers the plot of the novel. What are the consequences of a young man’s knowledge of his mother’s adultery? How will that knowledge affect his psychological and emotional development?
This novel is not really about the moral conundrums raised by the advent of digital technology. The author uses the e-mail reference as a way to help the reader enter the story and encounter the musings of a troubled young man. The book is not a record of the correspondence between his mother and her lover or his mother and her friends. Only a few messages are included in the text. The purpose of the novel is to record the young man’s painful recollections of how he survived his mother’s short-lived (less than a year) adulterous affair, as viewed from his perspective at least ten years after the fact.
The title of the book suggests a major theme at work in the story. Henry equates his mother’s adultery to an act of disobedience against the rules that, in his mind, govern the family unit. His mother disobeyed her marriage vows and thus betrayed her husband. More important, she disobeyed her vows to her children, and especially to her son. Henry repeatedly underscores the special basis of his relationship to his mother. He was the first child, and he remembers his mother coming into his room and giving him a sense of security and love by her nearness. Henry also notes how the arrival of the second child, his sister, Elvira, shifted the elemental basis of this mother-son bond.
After the affair begins, Henry’s mother goes to a psychic. He learns from an e-mail message that the psychic claimed that Henry and his mother were once married in a former life. Henry is so taken by this image of their bond in a former life that he revisits the psychic on his own and tries to gain some clarification about this former life. At one point he imagines breaking her—a violent metaphor—in order to conceive of her as a lover of another man. In that metaphor of separation, he sees then a way to control his mother, like a puppeteer controlling his creation. He plays God. He reads their messages and he judges them—but at what cost to his emotional development?
The mother-son split is also indicated by a special way Henry refers to his mother in his novel. Sometimes he refers to her as “mother,” but when he speaks of her in the context of her love affair with Richard Polloco, he calls her “Mrs. Shaw,” as if he stands apart from her, a remote and unremitting judge. In this way he has also broken her, split her into two identities, one reflecting the mother-son bond, the other representing his mother’s disobedience and betrayal.
His mother’s affair was a complex and unpredictable shift in the basis of her identity and her sense of self. She did fall in love, but she never lost sight of her allegiance to her family unit. She was split into two complementary opposites—a woman who had a home with her lover and a woman who had a home with her family. Through it all, however, her son proves an unstable and unforgiving witness of what he can only consider her misdeeds, and begins to withdraw from human companionship. Instead, he embraces his story, or “his-story,” as a kind of refuge, a place of security and control over the complexities of life. He feels less lonely and less empty when he reviews the story, when he compiles the history. Long after he left home, he returned to the story as source material for a film school project, and for years afterward he has revisited his printed copies of the e-mails and reread them as if to find new answers in the archive.
Most of the action in the novel concerns the story of Henry’s sister, Elvira. Her passion is Civil War reenactments. She dresses authentically and plays her part as if she were a young man by the name of Elvirnon. Henry believes his mother is disappointed with Elvira’s conduct. He thinks Elvira’s disobedience is based on her turning her back on the conventional image of womanhood her mother expected her to embrace. In fact, the climactic action of the novel revolves around Elvira’s participation in a hard-core reenactment group that admits her to their regiment—not knowing she is a young woman. In that scene her identity is discovered by accident while everyone is sitting around a campfire. When the men realize there is a woman in their midst, they crowd around her, rip off her vest, and carry her down a hill toward a small pond. Her mother comes over the hill, screaming, brandishing a small knife she picked up at the campfire, and rescues her. Elizabeth holds Elvira to her breast and wards off the men with the force of her character and rage.
Henry, however, cannot grasp the significance of what almost occurred to Elvira. He does not see that—if circumstances had been altered only slightly—the men would have further brutalized and even raped Elvira. Henry also does not understand why his mother acted so forcefully to rescue her daughter. Henry misses another irony. His mother’s response also inspires his father to defend Elvira before the men who attacked her. The parents’ defense of one of their children unifies them once again; within a few months, Elizabeth’s affair with Richard Polloco ends. Elvira is crushed by this trauma, but eventually she regains her sense of self and channels her passions through social activism.
One of the difficulties in reading this book is coming to grips with the limits of Henry’s narration. Clearly he is an unreliable narrator in the sense that his judgments are often clouded by jealousy, rage, desire for revenge, and a generalized sense of malevolence toward his mother. The presence of more balanced points of view would, of necessity, alter the reader’s perception of this novel. Readers would gain more clues to the troubling state of Henry’s mind. Readers expect a first-person narrator to redeem himself somehow, based upon his response to a variety of crises. If at first Henry is a harsh and unremitting judge, meting out moral and spiritual punishment to the mortals below him, then eventually he should come to some understanding of the limits of his knowledge and control over the lives of others. He should forgive his mother and he should forgive himself for his own acts of disobedience. He should reconcile himself to the subtleties, ambiguities, and complexities of adulthood. He accomplishes none of these resolutions, however. He is not transformed by participation in this story.
Henry tells his story from the remove of about ten years; but readers never gain an adequate understanding of where he is in the present tense. He seems to have been expelled from the family. Everyone comes through the crisis of the adulterous affair relatively unscathed, except for Henry. What happens to him? There is no objective voice to tell readers how he turns out. Readers are left with an unsettling feeling that Henry’s future happiness is in limbo. He seems unfulfilled and incomplete at the end of his story.
The Reenactment could be an alternative title for this novel. Elvira’s passion for Civil War reenactment is one of the central plot points, and at the end of the novel the narrator reports that his father became a sergeant in a reenactment unit. The term “reenactment” also becomes a metaphor for the reenacting of universal aspects of the human drama—for example, the reenactment of the Fall (the son’s spying on his mother’s e-mails), the reenactment of adultery (Elizabeth and Richard), the reenactment of a first love affair (between Henry and Lily), and the reenactment of the severing of bonds between a mother and a son (Henry and Elizabeth). In her first e-mail message to her friend Jane, Elizabeth writes, “This is an old story. There is nothing new in it.” In other words, these characters experience what others have experienced throughout all of time, and yet each feels the power of the events as original and unique.
The novel may remind readers of Judith Guest’s Ordinary People (1976), a novel about a son’s rage at his mother, who seems unable to respond to him emotionally after the accidental death of her eldest son. Calvin, the young man in that novel, realizes that his mother blames him for his brother’s drowning; and yet, more significantly, he learns that he has to forgive his mother for not being able to forgive him. Calvin also has a psychiatrist to confide in and rely upon. His love relationship with a young woman from his high school significantly promotes his psychological healing. In Disobedience, Henry has two women in his life outside his family. The first is his friend Karen, an overweight young woman his age who wears dowdy clothes and espouses radical feminist ideals. Karen is a free thinker, compassionate and articulate. However, Henry never takes advantage of her wisdom and does not confide in her until two years after the affair ends. The other woman in his life is Lily, an idealized fantasy version of young womanhood. Henry’s first sexual experience was with Lily the summer before his mother began her affair. When Henry confides in her, she offers him no insight into his emotional dilemma. She plays the role of the passive affirmer of the hero. There is no one to criticize Henry, to question him, or to undermine his negativity. There are a few instances in the novel when the reader learns through his narration that Henry may be in great emotional pain, a pain so great that it is clouding his judgment. However, those glimpses of remorse or self-doubt soon are overwhelmed by more negativity and rage on his part.
Unfortunately, Henry never forgives his mother for what he construes as her act of disobedience to him, her son. Henry’s rock—analogous to Sisyphus’s rock—is the story he holds in his breast, the story he tells in this novel. He cannot resolve the story; he cannot reconcile himself to the terms required by its outcome. He cannot find a way to get on with his life. He ends the novel with a cryptic note that illustrates the repression of his emotions and the imprisonment of his heart: “But the only story I want to tell, the only one I seem to have in me, is this one. It is always about her.”