A Visit Home

by Will Aitken

It began with the death of a friend - actually more of an acquaintance, which made it all the more disturbing for its irrationality. It continued in little ways, little disturbances, provoking his anger, upsetting the well-honed rhythm of his daily life. Daniel tried to understand, tried to figure out the cause for this upheaval. His life was good. He loved his wife, had a happy marriage complete with two stepsons. He even found his job to be generally satisfying. Still, something was wrong. And then he remembered. It didn't come back to him at once, but in small, knife-like thrusts. Associations, memories, reminders, gathering around him. Pictures. Sounds. A phrase of music, a moment in a film. Memories of pain, of dislocation, of shame. Mental pictures of a child, a young boy. Memories of the things that were done to him. But why? And who? The little boy was himself, of course, and little by little he came to understand. The things that he was remembering weren't fantasies, but truths - terrible truths - wrapped in years of denial. Daniel was indeed the little boy, and the man who stole his childhood was his father. A Visit Home is the compelling, disturbing story of a man's awakening to the reality of incest, to truths long buried, to wounds that have refused to heal. As Daniel returns home to see his parents, to address the past so that he can get on with his life, he confronts even more painful realities - a father who won't deal with his son's reawakened memories; a mother who refuses to understand. A Visit Home is a novel of great emotional power and depth, told with absolute honesty, a story at once unsettling and life-affirming.

Genres: Fiction

285 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1993

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 1 out of 5]

Before providing my caustic review I thought it only fair to reproduce the Kikus review from 1993 when the novel was published:

"A careful, well-made chronicle of a man's attempt to dredge up childhood abuse and of his later confrontation with his father. Aitken's second (Terre Haute, 1989)—though sometimes too programmatic—builds to a moving finale that refuses to simplify events. Daniel Kenning, well-married to Leslie, is an award-winning architect. But when the death of an acquaintance oddly touches him, he begins to understand—also thanks to the help of a female therapist—how much of his life has been repressed. Emotionally withdrawn from his own family, and assuming that's the way things must be, Daniel remembers (with therapeutic aid) his own adolescent homosexuality, savage beatings from his father, and, finally, sexual abuse. At times this is all laid out too neatly—Daniel on the couch deftly being led by the miraculous therapist to the secret of the family romance—but Aitken, once he gets all the background into the story, picks up the narrative nicely when Daniel goes home, Ö la Roseanne Barr and many others, to ``break the silence.'' Aitken dazzles the rest of the way, carefully sidestepping easy melodrama. Daniel's father, a retired cosmetic surgeon, and his mother are both unwilling to admit the truth of the past, and Daniel's mother sends her son away after the inevitable confrontation. Back home, Leslie suggests a separation, and Daniel goes to Japan for a bout of landscape architecture, where he has a kind of epiphany and a tender nonsexual night with a young man before returning home when his father is taken ill. By the close, only Daniel's own family life is resolved—he is now able to love his wife and boys without holding back. Occasionally too much is telegraphed too soon, but Aitken's novel, articulate and impressive, handles a controversial issue engagingly while mostly staying away from therapeutic jargon or easy answers."

I've posted the above because I respect Aitken as a writer, I loved his first novel 'Terre Haute', but there are occasions when a novel's premise is so fatally flawed that it is impossible to read once the cultural background it emerged in has altered and/or disappeared. 'A Visit Home' is a product of the era of 'recovered' memories of childhood sexual abuse and the hysteria over abuse by 'satanic cults' which flourished in the late 1980s and well into the 1990s. Even at the time I thought so much of it was a crock-of-shit (please see my footnote *1 below).

What was so infuriating about the 'recovered memory' farce was that instead of looking at the real victims of child abuse (and they were many and had no trouble recalling in detail what they suffered) it shifted attention on to those who could afford therapy to try try and find excuses for why their rich and successful lives, or their privileged upbringings, had left feeling unhappy unloved.

Even the review quoted recognises that Aitken's novel is programmatic in the way the revelation of 'abuse' is foreshadowed and ultimately 'revealed' by the omniscient therapist. Although Aitken doesn't present the therapist as planting memories or guiding him but, reading the novel now, it is easy to see that this was, as so many examinations of such revelation in reality did, what in fact happened.

A great disappointment and novel it is impossible to recommend.

*1 I do not want my review to turn into a discussion of 'recovered memory' but I remember living in the UK and the Orkney child abuse hysteria (anyone under fifty will almost certainly need to Google much of what I mention) and the use of 'anal dilation' as diagnostic tool - which rang enormous alarm bells for me because this 'diagnostic' tool was one long used to 'prove' that individuals were indulging in sodomy. It was used on Roger Casement, after his execution, and in 1870 in the 'Bolton & Parke' prosecution (see 'Fanny and Stella' by Neil McKenna) and many other unfortunate to attract the attention of the law. That it was still being used in the 1990s shocked me but also convinced me of the dubiety of the recovered memory/satanic abuse accusations. Interestingly the Wikipedia accounts of the Orkney scandal does not mention the use of the anal dilation diagnosis and it is only by searching under the heading anal dilation that you will learn of use back then.

[alexander shay · Rating 2 out of 5]

I should have learned my lesson with Aitken's last book. Both titles are very literary, and I am not a literary reader. Aitken's style is very minimal and direct, relying entirely on actions and dialogue of the characters with no internal thoughts or explanations of behavior (or very little). This book felt entirely character driven with no plot to speak of, only a chronological series of vaguely related incidents, all of which felt very cold and disconnected because of the stilted dialogue of the characters and how much of it there was and how little it actually achieved.