THERE’S GOING TO BE TROUBLE, by Jen Silverman
I recently gave birth, and there are moments when I look at my son and feel the heavy knowledge that he will carry the burden of my mistakes. In other moments there’s lightness, for motherhood, in just a few months, has taught me that my influence is limited, despite my best attempts and biggest failures. That dichotomy is at the core of Jen Silverman’s smart, reflective new novel, “There’s Going to Be Trouble,” which follows two generations of activists wrestling with the errors of the past as they strive to draft a more survivable future.
Minnow Hunter is an interim literature teacher at an unnamed university in Paris, having escaped to the city after a scandal (the details of which the novel initially withholds) at a private high school in the United States. She arrives at the height of the Yellow Vest protests, and at a demonstration she stumbles upon Charles Vernier, a young, popular communications and media teacher from a wealthy and important family who works at Minnow’s university and who brings her even more intimately into the fold of the protesters. The pair quickly fall in love, and the relationship’s complicated nature provokes Minnow’s political and personal awakening.
Five decades earlier, Minnow’s father, Keen, is a chemistry student at Harvard, as anti-Vietnam War protests disrupt the university’s studious peace. Like Minnow, Keen becomes infatuated with a fiery young activist — in his case, a young woman named Olya who sweeps him into the antiwar movement, which, under Olya’s fierce leadership, is considering more violent action. The novel jumps between these two timelines, as they each gets pulled into the throes of boiling movements.
For the first third of the book or so, I stumbled over the novel’s execution. Clumsy prose weakens the story as a whole — characters speak in overly grand pronouncements and with unrealistic conviction; clichés, such as “the smile slid off his face” and “trapping him like a fly in amber,” riddle the text; intermittent point-of-view shifts (not the expected jumps between characters but more distracting moves from close to omniscient perspectives) muddle the narrative flow. And the romance between Charles and Minnow is initially awkward, eliciting the same type of cringey reaction you feel when you are watching a movie with your parents and a sex scene comes on.
But as relationships complicate and deepen, and as the intensity ratchets up, all stylistic inconsistencies fall away. Silverman clearly has an exceptional talent for dramatic tension: Some of the book’s best scenes occur as characters battle out philosophical and political disagreements, whether they’re arguing in the relative safety of a dinner party or volleying back and forth from a tall window to a street teeming with riot police below.
Silverman’s novel is framed around how one chooses to participate in protest, but its heart lies in how its characters allow relationships and loss to guide their personal philosophies. Keen’s experiences, mistakes and tragedies nearly destroy his ability to offer forgiveness and feel hope. Minnow is grappling with a hardship too — after her private high school disgrace, her father stops talking to her, a painful loss because, growing up, he “had been her whole world,” Silverman writes. “He had shaped the universe to her understanding.” How Minnow allows her own failures (and her father’s) to guide her forward is one of the book’s central questions.
Minnow’s time in Paris teaches her about French politics and righteousness and duty, yes. But it also offers her clarity on what she wants to inherit from her father and what she wants to leave behind. Deciphering that is the great responsibility we all have. Minnow had to figure it out, just as Keen had to before her, just as I have to, and someday, so will my own son, too.
THERE’S GOING TO BE TROUBLE | By Jen Silverman | Random House | 308 pp. | $29
