loving husband toward Setsu (and a dot-
ing father to their four children), Hearn’s
personal relationships were, for the most
part, marked by a kind of skittishness
and extreme sensitivity; if he felt slighted
or unwanted, he would break off a friend-
ship or a romance immediately, without
explanation. His first biographer (and
longtime friend), Elizabeth Bisland, writ-
ing in 1906, dated to Hearn’s childhood
“his strange distrusts, his unconquerable
terror of the potentialities which he sus-
pected as lurking beneath the frankest
exterior, and his constant, morbid dread
of betrayal and abandonment by even
his closest friends.”
Who can blame him? He waited all
his life, if only in dreams, for the return
of the one who abandoned him, who ex-
isted on the other side of some uncanny
perceptual curtain. There is a sameness
to the ghost stories, and it becomes poi-
gnant to the degree that one accepts these
traditional Japanese tales, in this hybrid
telling and package, as an oblique form
of auto-therapy, scaring their teller along
with his audience and then resolving that
fear in one stroke, at least until the next
night, when it will have to be done all
over again. There is something narcis-
sistic about this project—something
self-absorbed, in a way that only the emo-
tionally wounded can be. Two thousand
years of Buddhist folk tradition were
drawn into the service of one European
man’s psychodrama. (If Hearn’s white-
ness was doubtful in Europe, it was cer-
tainly not in Japan.) So, too, were the
real lives of others. Truong’s novel not
only tells their story but does so in their
voices; “The Sweetest Fruits” takes the
somewhat stagy form of three long mono-
logues, delivered to silent interviewers.
The dilemma faced by “The Sweet-
est Fruits” is that it is explicitly a kind of
historical salvage operation, an act of rec-
lamation and redemption; and what would
be the purpose of redeeming the long-si-
lent voices of these women only to make
them critique or compromise themselves?
It’s a generous impulse, yet it makes for
a somewhat uniform, hagiographical tone,
which favors dignity over complexity. The
real-life Rosa, for instance, is a fascinat-
ing character—mistreated, disoriented,
beset by demons from within and with-
out—and the challenge of inhabiting her
empathetically enough to make us sym-
pathize with her Medea-like decision to
abandon her four-year-old son would
normally be catnip to any fiction writer
as good and as serious as Truong. But the
fifty-odd pages of the novel narrated in
Rosa’s voice, ostensibly while on her voy-
age from Dublin back to the Greek is-
lands, scarcely touch on this decision. In-stead, we get extended sensory descriptions
of life on Lefkáda, memories that glow
through a diffusive haze of metaphor.
Here is how Truong’s Rosa describes her
first sight of Charles Hearn, in a church:
The curls of smoke from the censers were
forming lace doves, which hovered near the
Holy Altar as they often do, but that morning
a dove broke from the flock and flew toward
the far right edge of the nave. My eyes fol-
lowed, and the dove took me to the face of a
young man with large round eyes, thick curved
brows, and a head of brown curls swept to one
side of his forehead.... Connected by a thin,
strong rope, his body pulled mine out of those
same doors. My legs were certain of what they
had to do.
This character might well seek to
withdraw into happy early memories,
rather than dwell on a trip meant to save
her own life even if it came at the cost
of her bond with her child. But the novel
retreats from that complexity as well
(“The Angels told me that it was for the
best. ... I cannot love you more than to
leave you”), and as a result Rosa’s voice
runs together a bit with those of Ale-
thea and Setsu. The novel never finds
any angle of vision over or around Rosa’s,
generating sonorous passages in which
sentimentality functions as a kind of de-
nial: “Fate took me to the man who would
become your father, and now fate has
taken me away from you, my blessed
[child]. Doors open and doors close, and
we must be prepared to enter or leave.”
“Fate” is, of course, one way of describ-
ing the action of the supernatural, and a
measure of the distinction between
Truong’s sensibility and Hearn’s is the
way their work understands and reflects
the operations of the unseen. In “The
Sweetest Fruits,” there is a kind of be-
nign divinity at work, an authorial force
that promotes resolution by tying up loose
ends. (In her acknowledgments, Truong
not only thanks Hearn but also reports
that Hearn told her, “You’re welcome.”)
Early in the novel, Rosa addresses
her absent son, recalling the fragrances
of their past life together: “A handful of
thyme crushed in your hands, a butter
cake, and a spoonful of light honey.” She
urges him to take refuge in these sensory
memories, just as she has: “Breathe in,
Patricio, and you will remember your
mother when she was at her happiest.”
Fifty years and two hundred and thirty
pages later, on the morning of his death,
Truong’s Lafcadio reports to Setsu a64 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER16, 2019
“Guys, this is midtown—it’ll be a bank in no time.”