Well constructed and well-written story about family and being there for one another during hard times. I enjoyed the way it was told as a narrative, thought it was slow in parts, and I really liked the way it ended as well.

When they get the phone call that their oldest son is in a coma in a hospital in the Norwegian city of Trondheim, Lil and Alba hurry there from their apartment in France, leaving their two other children, to be at their son's side. At the hospital, they are left waiting to see if he will regain consciousness and to find out what the damage to his brain is. Cormac James's novel follows the two women as they wait, stuck in a stressful situation, where the only thing they can do is wait. And, as they wait, as the medical staff work to pull him out of his coma, the fissures in their relationship are laid bare.

There's a lot of good stuff in this novel. James writes well and the character studies of the two women, especially Lil, are interesting. The Norwegian hospital and how the medical staff become involved in the lives of this small family is detailed and very different from how this same situation would be handled in the US. There are, however, two issues I have with this novel. The first is that I wonder why the author chose to make the characters two women, when their marriage is a stereo-typed caricature of a heterosexual relationship, with one character being uncommunicative, contemptuous of her wife, enjoying casual affairs and preferring to drink over showing any affection for the woman she married. The other woman is nurturing, has a body that shows the impact of three pregnancies, knits, needs affection, has religious beliefs and keeps her own anger hidden from everyone, including herself. My second issue is the lack of character development. Despite the great upheaval and shock of their son's medical emergency, neither woman changes at all during this book. I waited for a confrontation, a real conversation, a reconciliation, or a decision from one of them that being married to someone you hate is unhealthy and divorce is a reasonable solution, at the very least, and (spoiler alert) none of that happened. James does write well and I'm interested in seeing how he develops as a writer. ( )

Trondheim takes place in the run up to Christmas. Two married women get a call that their son is in the ICU in a coma and they go to Norway and spend the season in the hospital (with their other two children) waiting for the time when the doctors will bring their son out of his medically induced coma to see whether he will live, whether he will have brain damage. The novel stays locked in the present in a way that I didn't anticipate, very little in the way of flashbacks, it's focused on the waiting and the slow move from shock and fear to beginning to take some time to step away from the present emergency. Difficult but poignant.

A common literary trope is marital bliss. What’s much more interesting, however, is to put a long-standing couple into a challenging situation and then watch how they respond. Albee did this to horrifying effect in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff?” It turned out that George and Martha had some pretty upsetting problems underlying their “happy” marriage. James’ approach to this experiment is much more subtle, however. He gives us Alba, a conventional introvert, and Lil, an unsentimental extrovert. They have a long-term lesbian marriage with three seemingly well-adjusted children living in rural France. James exposes their troubled relationship in the most brutal fashion imaginable. Their oldest son, Pierre, suffers a cardiac arrest while away at school in Trondheim, Norway. Despite being revived by a passing bus driver, Pierre is now in a coma induced by a combination of brain trauma and medical intervention. Will he survive? Will he have permanent brain damage? Will the doctors be able to safely bring him out of the coma? No one knows. And that’s the challenge James presents to Alba and Lil.

James ratchets up his protagonists’ feelings of fear, dread, and hopelessness by putting them in the most claustrophobic setting imaginable—an ICU in Trondheim, Norway in mid-winter. Although James does not belabor the point, Trondheim is isolated only a few hundred miles from the Artic Circle and experiences almost total darkness at that time of year. Alba and Lil quickly display petty feelings of resentment characterized by Alba’s mystical religious fervor and rejection of Lil’s more pragmatic approach to life, including heavy drinking and romantic entanglements. Lil, on the other hand, doesn’t have the patience Alba seems to require.

James explores multiple themes in his narrative including the effects crises have on family dynamics, the roles that faith and miracles play in storytelling, and the limits of hope and forgiveness. Yet his overarching theme seems to be the disparity between surface appearances and underlying reality. Clearly, things aren’t always what they seem. What appears to be a successful marriage is really deeply troubled. From the hospital, the women notice an adjacent building site where the construction is hidden behind a print of a finished building. Christmas lights decorate the town where a young man is isolated from his surroundings. Lil encounters a runaway who she sees as needing her help, but the young woman is skeptical of her motives and ultimately rejects her help. The characters assemble on the roof of the hospital to observe Pierre’s doctor practice shooting at live targets—or maybe not. James also suggests that Pierre may have fled to Trondheim for school to escape a deeply dysfunctional family.

This is a meditative novel filled with close observations of characters in isolation and experiencing psychological pain. Notwithstanding its dark themes, the narrative is satisfying, often lyrical, and deeply moving. ( )

This is a family story centered around a married lesbian couple whose 20-year-old son is in a coma in a Norwegian hospital, thousands of miles away from their home in France. These two mothers, Lil and Alba, already have a strained relationship, and they have a harrowing journey and days of waiting and watching the medical team care for their son. There is a truly extreme atmosphere of love and anxiety and hope and fear mixed together in this story. I found the hospital scenes very moving, and it was never clear until the end of the book if their son would awaken from the coma or if their marriage would survive. A well-written novel. ( )