THE LIMITS, by Nell Freudenberger
“The future is already here,” goes a line usually attributed to William Gibson. “It’s just not very evenly distributed.” So it can seem with climate change. Floods in Libya, temperatures above 125 degrees in China and Iran, wildfires across Hawaii and Canada and Tenerife: Those of us lucky enough not to be directly affected by these multiplying events can only watch from the intimate but infinite distance of our phone screens, a peculiarly modern kind of powerlessness.
In her involving new novel, “The Limits,” the gifted veteran author Nell Freudenberger wants to close this gap. The book is set during the first year of the pandemic, partly in New York and partly in Tahiti; its subject, as it roves among characters in the two places, is the essential human similarity of our complicated families and communities everywhere on this imperiled planet.
“The Limits” revolves around two women, the past and current wives of a prominent Manhattan cardiologist. The ex-wife is Nathalie, a French scientist studying coral at the CRIOBE, a research station on the island of Mo’orea in French Polynesia. As the book begins, she sends her daughter, the bright but stubborn 15-year-old Pia, to live in New York with her father, Stephen, and his new wife, Kate, a high school teacher who has just become pregnant.
Some novelists might confine their story to this quartet. Freudenberger, whose work has been ambitious in its scope since her sensational 2003 debut collection, “Lucky Girls,” introduces an additional focal character, Athyna. She’s a student of Kate’s from a disadvantaged background, and has to balance her schoolwork and standard teen problems with caring — tenderly but distractedly — for her 4-year-old nephew.
By the time Athyna meets Pia, in the culmination of the book’s plotlines, the reader already knows how different their lives are. Take what they eat. Athyna makes her nephew mac and cheese:“They were out of milk, but Marcus didn’t care. He was happy with the cheese powder mixed with some butter and the macaroni.” Not much later, Pia’s father goes shopping and picks up “local milk and butter, swordfish, baby lettuce and butternut squash. Fresh sage and rosemary, and … at the last minute, a plum pie and some honeycomb ice cream. He thought they deserved a treat.”
These contrasts sound like the grounding for a big, global, omnidirectionally curious midcareer novel, reminiscent of the work of Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie or Jonathan Franzen. And Freudenberger, with topical contemporary novels like “The Newlyweds” and “The Dissident” behind her, gamely meets that challenge.
But more often, in fact, “The Limits” feels microscopically small. The book’s success in drawing together its threads is mixed — Pia and Athyna’s meeting doesn’t lead to much, and a fuzzy subplot hinting at a possible terrorist act is swept quickly away in the finale — but it is easily most alive and nuanced when Freudenberger is writing about contemporary New York parenting, the impossible task of raising a teenager with quicksilver moods, the sheer physical exhaustion of it all. The pregnant Kate “looked tired,” the author tells us in one of many beautifully alert moments, “as if the baby was the one doing all the sleeping.”
Partly, this is doubtless because the novel is set in the homebound months of 2020. And Freudenberger is scrupulous in her depictions of Tahiti, as well as the lives of public high school kids in New York; the book’s acknowledgments reveal she visited French Polynesia for research and has long taught as a visiting writer in Brooklyn schools.
On the other hand, there’s still something slightly paternalistic about the book’s tone. “The Limits” is effortlessly attuned to wealth, full of references to second homes in Amagansett (but barely a shack!) and the legendarily illiberal Maidstone Club; Stephen’s mother, a retired doctor, is casually revealed to be on the board of the New York City Ballet. All of this feels less consciously fabricated than the scenes about Tahitians or Athyna, and Freudenberger certainly seems from the outside to belong to the affluent milieu she describes — a graduate of Harvard living with her husband and children in Brooklyn, recipient in her distinguished career of a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Pulitzer grant.
In other words: Does she agree that her characters deserve that treat?
It’s a sad fact of the novel as a genre that so worryingly many of the great ones can be boiled down to the hypothetical question “What if a rich person had to experience a crisis?” “The Limits” is that kind of book, it must be conceded. But to her vast credit, Freudenberger has a brain and a conscience, and it’s clear that she is trying to simultaneously scrutinize her experiences as a particular kind of parent in New York and tie them to a larger world. If she sometimes feels pinioned between the two — well, so are we all.
The very best parts of “The Limits” are its descriptions of the natural scenery around Mo’orea. Perhaps the key theme of Freudenberger’s career is dislocation — the idea that seeing the foreign in the world can elicit, too, the foreign within us — and Nathalie, the book’s watchful conscience, personifies this idea. She observes her beloved corals in despondent farewell, sentient beings “that had been around when the pharaohs ruled Egypt … a whole miraculous world that had been undisturbed because nothing had changed there — not the darkness or the pressure or the clarity of the water — for all those thousands of years.”
Soon enough, climate change will cease to be a problem divided this neatly between rich and poor. We are so laughably ignorant of what we have wrought, “The Limits” suggests, that we can scarcely conceive of what we may yet lose. Freudenberger’s writing, which has so often touched on the personal ramifications of the impersonal vectors of globalism and science, has in a way been leading to exactly this subject. But it is the usual story, familiar to fathers and mothers and caretakers like Athyna the world over. We can pretend that catastrophes will always happen elsewhere, until they’re happening to us.
THE LIMITS | Nell Freudenberger | Knopf | 368 pp. | $29
