Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation
By Sarah Yahm (Dzanc Books)

What would you do if you were diagnosed with a degenerative disease, the same one that killed your mother, whose slow death you watched? Knowing the excruciating decline, to what lengths would you go to protect your partner and child? These are just some of the questions that author Sarah Yahm tackles in her novel Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation.

A family saga spanning more than 40 years, Yahm’s book follows Louise Rakoff, a cellist, who meets therapist-in-training Leon Rosenberg at a Rosh Hashanah dinner the night after her mother’s funeral in 1974. After a rocky start, they marry and have a daughter, Lydia. Louise struggles to adjust to motherhood, but in time, the couple settles into the rhythm and trappings of late-20th century Jewish American suburban parenthood, set against Lydia’s obsessions, compulsions and social difficulties.

Then Louise starts dropping things, and testing subsequently reveals that she has a rare degenerative genetic disease. The news immediately starts fracturing the foundation of their family. Lydia begins acting out and Leon hides his devastation with a mix of optimism and denial.

Yahm describes all this in stark language, allowing the characters and the emotional gravity of the situation to stay at the forefront: “She didn’t know how it was physically possible for the air in the house to be sad, like the molecular properties of oxygen had changed within its four walls,” she writes of Lydia.

Each member of the family is in their own orbit, warily circling each other while trying to make sense of the diagnosis. And then Louise suddenly abandons her husband and teenage daughter, an act that sends Leon and Lydia spinning even further into separate orbits in their grief and struggle to make sense of an abandonment carried out, paradoxically, out of love.

Yahm shows how life goes on—there are clients to see, school to attend, bills to pay—while at the same time, everything has changed. She deftly illustrates the ways loss can be wholly unmooring, both physically and mentally.

All this is setup for the second half of the book, as Leon and Lydia both search for who they really are and what they really want—and attempt to come to terms with how Louise’s decisions shaped them.

There are no tidy endings to be found in this story, just hard truths. Ultimately, Yahm’s novel is a story about the risks we take when we love, the search for the strength to go on when we think we cannot and how we are transformed by both.

Jaime Herndon is a writer and avid reader. Her work can be found at Book Riot, Kveller and other places.