A fine setting for sorrow

By Kaui Hart Hemmings

Random House. 283 pp. $25

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Reviewed by Karen Heller

Inquirer Staff Writer

nolead ends Certain locales lend themselves to fiction better than others, the more exotic being often the better. Sure, exceptions abound. Jonathan Franzen's haunting The Twenty-Seventh City was set in his native St. Louis, and Michael Chabon set the terrific Mysteries of Pittsburgh in his college town. But when a gifted writer is paired with a fetching, remote place, the effects are often magical.

Such is the case with Chabon's latest triumph, The Yiddish Policeman's Union, set in Sitka, Alaska. It's also true of Kaui Hart Hemmings' first novel, The Descendants, set in her birthplace of Hawaii. The reader is immensely happy to spend time in this place of perpetual beach, surfing and arrested youth.

As a novel exploring the unique topography and culture of the islands, the book ranks up there with Susanna Moore's My Old Sweetheart. It's no surprise that director Alexander Payne (Sideways, About Schmidt) has secured the rights. Done properly, the book would make a terrific movie.

The rich understanding of Hawaii's unique community helps temper The Descendants' story, which is often a dolorous one, though not without flashes of wit. The novel begins with narrator Matt King's wife, Joanie, in an irreversible coma caused by her own recklessness: She was ejected from a power boat going 80 miles an hour. A former model captivating everyone in her orbit, though often ignored by Matt, Joanie bores easily and takes to drink, bad behavior and the kind of land and water sports that tend to do in beach bums half her age.

The aptly named King has his own history to contend with. "I belong to one of those Hawaii families who make money off of luck and dead people." He's the principal heir to a huge land fortune created when his great-grandmother, Princess Kekipi, the last direct descendant of King Kamehameha, Hawaii's first king, married his great-grandfather, a haole (Hawaiian for white person) banker. King and his kin no longer look remotely native, and yet are primed to reap a huge benefit from prime real estate. That's a volcanic amount of guilt.

Then there are his daughters, precocious 10-year-old Scottie who is already posturing as a nasty adolescent and already-there Alex, a 17-year-old model, who has been sent away to boarding school to rid herself of drugs and bad behavior, achieving success only with the former. She's the very image of her dying mother, physically and emotionally, granting Matt a do-over of sorts, while seeing the potential collateral damage of heredity.

Meanwhile, there are terrific aperçus into what Hawaii has become:

Indeed, some of the the most powerful people in Hawaii look like bums or stuntmen. I think of our bloodline's progression. Our missionary ancestors came to the islands and told the Hawaiians to put on some clothes, work hard, and stop hula dancing. They make some business deals on the way, buying an island for ten grand, or marrying a princess and inheriting her land, and now their descendants don't work. They have stripped down to running shorts or bikinis and play beach volleyball and take up hula dancing.

As Matt copes with losing his wife, he learns to become a parent when already much pain has been inflicted. There's the promise of more, given the inexorable, slow loss of their mother. "I'm the backup candidate. I'm the dad."

The Descendants is a road novel or, more precisely, an island-hopping one, as Matt comes to terms with pulling the plug on his wife. He tells her friends and parents. He flies to the Big Island to reclaim Alex, and gains her slacker, stoner friend Sid at precisely the moment he would rather not.

Now, he's saddled with three kids going through assorted crises, including the discovery that Joanie had a lover, a toothy sport who is - what else? - a real estate agent positioned to make money on the estate's epic sale.

Hemmings, 31, previously published a short story collection, House of Thieves (2005), where these characters originally appeared. She writes about tweener and teenage children with special insight and sensitivity, caroming between horror and tenderness.

Matt King's true trip is his evolution into an involved parent, who begins to save his emotionally abandoned children, and also hapless Sid, as he lets go of his wife while excavating the true nature of their union.

The Descendants offers hope and redemption even as an unforgettable beauty slips from life. Hemmings' talent as a writer, a shaper of an indelible story and characters, is both affecting and clear.