Published in 2000 and set largely around 1990, Disobedience by Jane Hamilton is a story told by Henry, age 27. We know he’s gone to film school and filmed projects about his family, but they don’t land, so a leap in logic suggests he’s now writing about his family. In particular, Henry mulls over the year before high school graduation when he’s set his mother up with her first email account on this new thing known as the Internet. One day, without thinking he logs into her account instead of his own, and upon hearing “You’ve Got Mail,” sees that his mother is having an affair. Over the course of the novel, Henry reads and prints every email between his mother and her lover.
Henry’s mother emails her friend to say that what she is doing is not new or unique, that it is a tale as old as time. Thus, Hamilton winks at her readers, confirming she knows this sounds like just another affair novel. However, getting the story from the son is unique because he is not one of the lovers, and he’s also understanding everything he hears and reads through his apathetic 90’s teen guy brain. For example, while he thinks he alone holds this secret on his shoulders, it’s later revealed (and obvious to most of us) that everybody and their brother knows about the extramarital relationship.
But this wouldn’t be a Hamilton novel without some bizarre characters who are just true enough to be believable. Henry’s father is a high school history teacher who has led Henry’s younger sister into a life long obsession with the Civil War. She knows all the facts and trivia, has handmade a uniform so she can dress as a reenactor, and rejects all expected attributes of a thirteen-years-old girl, including her new breasts.
Also, the family were homesteaders in Vermont who sent their kids to an alternative hippy school before Henry’s dad was fired for being too liberal in his teaching (today, they would say he had a woke curriculum), which is why the family leaves Vermont for Chicago where the dad gets a teaching job and the mom continues her work as a freelance pianist.
Cleverly, Hamilton removed the issue of money by creating a wealthy grandmother whom Henry calls “Minty” (because she’s an old money bags). She doesn’t visit, but she does call to harangue the mother about raising an unfit daughter who proudly wears a Civil War uniform to a wedding and shaves her head.
What does it mean to be a girl or woman in this novel? Hamilton gives a variety of examples in the mother’s book club, a group Henry tries to avoid. His criticizes the group: “The others in the club unabashedly used the novels as springboards into contemporary life and in particular their own problems.” Interestingly, while Henry has obsessed over his mom’s affair for ten years and is now writing the story for us, she and her friends use books to process their lives, something I do in every book club.
Just to make things feel Freudian, Henry loses his virginity with a girl at the annual backwoods dancing camp (picture clogging dances from different cultures performed by these Earth child types) in Vermont. As he obsesses about seeing the girl again, his mother has the affair, mixing two stories of sex and longing. To confirm the weirdness, a psychic tells Henry’s mother that she and her son were married in a past life.
Jane Hamilton said that she wrote this novel in response to the comment that all women writers eventually pen an affair novel, and Disobedience was her response. Another excellent book by this author.
Grab the Lapels 
I’ve always enjoyed Hamilton’s work, but somehow had lost track of the newer novels(s)? I’ll be reading this one soon!
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So her husband knows and doesn’t care? But then it sounds like the whole family has issues. Glad you enjoyed it!
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I think the husband knows that his wife is going through some kind of crisis he doesn’t understand, and his personality is patient enough that he’s supportive of the rest of her life while she gets through it.
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Glad you enjoyed this! I suspect if I tried to read it, I’d just want it to be about the little sister who’s obsessed with the Civil War. She sounds like a brilliantly weird character!
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Ha, I thought you might feel that way, Lou! Interestingly, our next book is Cold Mountain, which is also about the Civil War. So many flies, so many amputations. And you guys think I’m brave for watching horror. *shudder
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Enjoyed this post Melanie. I had the same question as Stefanie – the husband knows and doesn’t care?
Also, you said this is Hamilton’s “affair” novel. Does she have a particular point she wants to make? (BTW I contend that every woman writer does end up writing one, though I suppose an affair plays a bit of a role in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.)
I’m also thinking about your comment that “she and her friends use books to process their lives, something I do in every book club”. Do I? Does my group? I feel perhaps we did more when we were younger than now, though perhaps it hinges on the word “process” and also, I suppose, on how broadly or narrowly we define “our lives”. I certainly feel that we use books to understand the world better, and we do frequently relate books to aspects of our lives.
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I can’t remember if it was a reporter or who, but it was someone in the audience who said every woman writes an affair novel. That makes me a little sad. Affair novels certainly fail the Bechdel test.
I think for Biscuit and me, processing happens without us thinking about it. Maybe it we’re trying to figure out a character — why she behaves as she does, why she exists in a certain fashion — we may compare the character to other people we know or experiences we’ve had. In putting two and two together, I think we learn more about the character and people we know (or even ourselves if we see something of ourselves in a character or situation).
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Yes, that’s sort of what I understood by processing. I think my group still does this but I feel it was more intense in our early years – perhaps because we were younger and still learning who we are and perhaps because we read more books likely to contain characters we could do this with. Not that you can’t do it with most characters at some level but, for example, this year we did it more with something like “Lessons in chemistry” than with “The marriage portrait” though both are fundamentally about women’s lack of power.
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I wonder if book about younger people help your group better understand the younger people in your lives. I know that I had a stretch during which I was reading books about people in their 80’s for hopes of understanding them better. The only problem is it seems to be people in their 50’s and 60’s writing about octogenarians.
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Yes, I think that’s true … books about people of different ages to ourselves can contribute to our understanding of where other people are.
But, haha, your last comment is now sounding a bit like Bill’s point that you can only write about what you know? I think that, if I were a writer, I could have written fairly sensibly about an 80 year old when I was 60 because I was spending a lot of time with them and was learning things about aging that I had no idea about when I was in my 20s and 30s. At 60 you are close enough to 80 to understand I think what might be going on?
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Perhaps! I know some people really hate “sensitivity readers” (and I know I hate that name), but I think it’s a good idea in general to get someone else closer to the character to read what you’ve written to see if it rings true at all. Even Neil Gaiman is guilty at times, such as his famous book American Gods, in which an American man goes to do the shopping and uses a trolley.
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What’s wrong with an American man shopping with a trolley? What do American men do? They don’t go shopping, or they don’t use a trolley?
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In the U.S. we call it a cart or a shopping cart. Trolley is British 🙂
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Ah! A linguistic issue, not a gender one! Gotcha! Thanks.
I’m aware of many such differences between our versions of English, but must admit that one had never really entered my consciousness even though we use Trolley here too.
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When I was a kid, I had a boardgame in which you would go shopping and had to find milk, cheese, an apple, and bread to put in your “trolley.” Interestingly, I learned that one early! I have no clue where the person who gave me that board game got it from or why it was British.
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Love it!
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[…] to read). But Hamilton has this dark, weird sense of humor and way of seeing things. For instance, Disobedience (2000) was her reaction to someone claiming women always write an affair novel. However, in 2009 […]
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This sounds like a fantastic book that I would enjoy. So much to unpack here! But also so annoying that a man would disparage a woman’s book club. If men get together to discuss a book its academic, if women get together to discuss a book they are just squawking birds picking apart their own life. Duh! Of course we are going to look at our own lives through the lens of a book discussion, isn’t this one of the points of reading? To learn about other people yes, but to gain perspective on our own life too?
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The son was 17 in 1990, so I’m guessing he was afflicted by the apathy and Nirvana, as so many young men were back then. At the end of the book, you really realize what an uninformed narrator he was, because he was so young.
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Now when I get books from you, I have to skip to the bottom to avoid spoilers! 😛
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I don’t think there are any spoilers in this review or the comments. Everything is up front, basically! You got this, homie.
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