Product Description

A perceptive, moving and funny novel about family life, love a; Reading someone else's e-mail is a quiet, clean enterprise. There is no pitter-pattering around the room, no opening and closing the desk drawers, no percussive creasing as you draw the paper from the envelope and unfold it...In and out of the files, no trace. It could be the work of a ghost, this electronic eavesdropping. Seventeen-year-old Henry Shaw learns of his mother's passionate affair when he stumbles across her e-mail correspondence with her lover. His image of her is shattered, but he cannot resist his electronic eavesdropping. Henry's younger sister, Elvira, is scornful of technology, stuck as she is in 1862 with her Civil War infantry regiment. For Elvira, much to her mother's sorrow and her historian father's pride, is a hardcore Civil War re-enactor. Displaced from Vermont to Chicago, each member of the Shaw family finds their dreams hard to realize and their expectations of life turned on their head. Disobedience is a compassionate, sharp, wicked and utterly contemporary novel about families, love and loyalty by a major literary talent.

---

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #294290 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
A wayward wife, an oedipally obsessed e-mail snoop, a pint-sized Civil War re-enactor (oops, make that living historian) and a cheerfully oblivious cuckold comprise the Shaws of Chicago, the decidedly quirky characters of Jane Hamilton's fourth novel, Disobedience. An unlikely family to fall prey to the vagaries of modern life, the Shaws are consumed with clog dancing, early music and the War Between the States. They do possess a computer, however, and when 17-year-old Henry stumbles into his mother's e-mail account and epistolary evidence of her affair with a Ukrainian violinist, he becomes consumed with this glimpse into her life as a woman, not simply a mother.

To picture my mother a lover, I had at first to break her in my mind's eye, hold her over my knee, like a stick, bust her in two. When that was done, when I had changed her like that, I could see her in a different way. I could put her through the motions like a jointed puppet, all dancy in the limbs, loose, nothing to hold her up but me.

While his mother (whom he refers to variously as Mrs Shaw, Beth or by her e-mail sobriquet, Liza38), dallies with her pen pal, whom she calls "the companion of my body, the guest of my heart", Henry experiences his own sexual awakening, his 13-year-old sister, Elvira, retreats into gender-bending historical fantasy, and their father remains determinedly absorbed in pedagogical responsibilities.

Ironically (and not completely convincingly) narrated by an adult Henry, Disobedience has a rollicking tone somewhat at odds with the sombre prospects that loom for this family. A very worldly teenager in some ways, despite the hippie wholesomeness of his family, Henry tells his tale in abundant, almost flowery prose, imagining his mother's private life with elegiac fervour. As in her earlier A Map of the World, Jane Hamilton writes with affection and insight about the darker side of apparently ordinary Midwestern folks. --Victoria Jenkins

Nicci Gerrard, Observer
'Jane Hamilton is the chronicler of family relationships…lush, easy to read, intense and brimming with dangerous emotions'

Helen Stevenson, Daily Mail
'Both delightful and profound. For lovers of writers such as Shields and Tyler, Jane Hamilton is unmissable'

---

Customer Reviews

ANOTHER TRIUMPH FOR JANE HAMILTON
Family dynamics and coming of age angst prevail in Disobedience, a stunning fourth novel from the gifted Jane Hamilton. With empathy and affection she enters her characters' lives to skillfully explore the ambiguous landscapes of human mind and heart.

Disobedience assumes varying forms and guises in this chronicle of one year in the life of the Shaw family, beginning with 17-year-old Henry who inadvertently opens his mother's email to discover that she is having an impassioned affair with Richard Polloco, a Ukrainian violin maker.

With his painful past of family terror during the Bolshevik Revolution, Polloco becomes to Beth Shaw "...a person with something real that had happened to him, that had wounded him. He was a person she might be able to comfort, a man she could lead out of the dark past, going from light to light to light."

Online in her loving communiques to Polloco, pianist and solid mother Beth has become Liza38, an i.d. bestowed upon her by Henry when he introduced her to the mysteries of computer operation. He wanted her to have a name with some gusto and this "sounded like the code name of a blond spy with a sizable bust" rather than a "flat, no crackle name, Beth."

The family is rounded out by father, Kevin, and thirteen-tear-old Elvira, a devoted, sometimes obsessive Civil War re-enactor who disguises herself as drummer boy Elviron to participate. She persists in always dressing in handmade Union uniforms, even to adding a clanking sword as she attends a family wedding. Elvira is encouraged in this pursuit by Kevin and worried over by Beth.

When Kevin, a liberal leaning high school history teacher, is ousted from his job in Vermont, a place Henry views as his "deepest sense of home," the Shaws move to an upscale suburb in Chicago.

Self described as "the heavyweight champion of depressed teenagehood," Henry wears long hair and wire rimmed specs. He is somewhat of a loner at his exclusive new school, and further alienated by the knowledge of Beth's unfaithfulness. Alternately fascinated and repelled, he knows he should not continue his "electronic eavesdropping," but he does. To him, her defection marks a loss of the childhood security that he once felt within his family circle. His response is further complicated by the fact that he has just experienced his first sexual encounter.

Beth's confessions of guilt to an online friend do little to win Henry's understanding or forgiveness. There are times when he is nominally courteous to her at best, entering into dinner table conversations only to taunt or disparage Elvira.

Some solace is found for Henry in his friendship with Karen, a schoolmate, who with her dyed black hair and bizarre clothing "looked as if she were a fifty-year-old masquerading as a teenager."

Were he to confide his mother's infidelity to Karen, he imagines she might attribute it to a menopausal thing, saying, "Think of the last egg hobbling down the fallopian tube, shrieking for one last sperm."

Ms. Hamilton has created an endearing figure in Henry, one who narrates his story with the insightfulness and bravado of an intelligent teenager. He is an embodiment of the difficulties encountered in growing up.

Reluctantly he accompanies Kevin, Beth and Elvira to a reenactment of the Battle of Shiloh. It is here that unforeseen events alter the family's course forever.

Deftly assured and almost preternaturally attuned to the feelings of a 17-year-old boy, Ms. Hamilton has again penned a story laced with humor, deep rooted love, and compassion. One could not find an abler guide to chart safe passage through the shoals of family life.