Book Review: ‘A Season of Light,’ by Julie Iromuanya

A SEASON OF LIGHT, by Julie Iromuanya

In Julie Iromuanya’s luminous sophomore novel, “A Season of Light,” a father descends into madness following the news that 276 schoolgirls have been abducted from their classrooms in Nigeria, his place of birth. Until now, Fidelis Ewerike has been a model immigrant. A child soldier of 16 on the losing side of the Nigerian civil war, Fidelis escaped after surviving long-buried horrors as a prisoner of war. He and his girlfriend, Adaobi, married and created a brand-new life in Florida, a life beyond their means but worthy of the future they’d dreamed up for their two sheltered American children. The past has been sealed in a box in the attic for decades, dormant but combustible.

When the novel opens, it is late spring 2014, and Fidelis, now a lawyer in his 60s, has lost the tenuous grip that kept a fragile life in place. Learning of the schoolgirls’ abduction, he can’t help revisiting the war he endured half a century ago: becoming fixated on the “sovereignty of the Biafran nation” and getting in contact with an American “assemblage of aged veterans who planned to one day lead a battalion to the capitol and demand the emancipation of Biafra.”

This dangerous meandering into a past brutality that killed thousands, including members of his family, forces Fidelis to confront the long-concealed memory of Ugochi, his younger sister who disappeared during the war when she was just 13. His mental decline is “swift,” and so is his family’s social plummet, as Fidelis is asked to take an “indefinite leave” from his firm. The Ewerikes lose their “stately home” and move to a housing development “so saturated with decay” that it “could only beget the death of dreams.”

Adaobi at first conspires to hide her husband’s mental state, clinging desperately to her social status and the so-called American dream. When Fidelis witnesses his 16-year-old daughter, Amara, applying her mother’s red lipstick, it dawns on him that his child is on the cusp of adulthood. “Like all men, he had been taught that girls are trouble,” Fidelis thinks upon learning of the Chibok kidnappings. “It was the complicated stillness of these nameless girls’ expressions that haunted him.” Now he decides that the only way to keep Amara safe — his daughter bears an uncanny resemblance to Ugochi — is by force: “He crushed the lipstick in his fist. He cut holes into her leggings and miniskirts, poured bleach on her spaghetti strap camisoles. He threw her cellphone out of the window, and he put a lock on her bedroom door.”

Iromuanya is a spectacular storyteller. A narrative that could have been dark and foreboding instead has a pronounced brilliance, and a thread of unexpected humor. Adaobi, attempting to find a solution for her family’s downturn, joins the congregation of an albino pastor with a penchant for slapping his parishioners. Amara ends up falling in love with a boy she never would have had she been free to leave her home. And her 14-year-old brother, Chuk, comes closer to understanding their father’s childhood trauma when he is harassed by neighborhood bullies.

There is a halo surrounding this narrative of loss and grief, which for this couple have calcified into guilt. Instead of succumbing to the kind of self-hate that can devour a person “from the inside out, leaving nothing but a carcass,” this family manages to find their way back to one another. Having tried to spare their children knowledge of the past, these parents learn that it is silence that causes the most devastating fracture of all.

A SEASON OF LIGHT | By Julie Iromuanya | Algonquin | 248 pp. | $29