The title of Fran Fabriczki’s debut novel, “Porcupines,” is taken from a parable from the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in which porcupines cope with freezing weather by huddling together for warmth — only to be repelled by the pain inflicted by each other’s quills.
It’s an apt metaphor for the challenges of relationships in the novel, as the protagonist’s strategy for getting through life is to keep others at bay, though she does so at a cost.
Although the story is not presented in linear time, we meet Szonja Imre in 1984 when she is a child in Washington, D.C., where her Hungarian diplomat father is posted. Her 20-year-old sister Rina has, to her parents’ disapproval, begun a relationship with Aron, an American Jew with Hungarian roots.
Five years later, with Communist rule having just ended, 18-year old Szonja leaves her parents in Budapest for a three-month visit to Los Angeles, where Rina and Aron have established a home with their two children.
Hoping for laughter and adventure, she is deeply disappointed upon arrival to discover that Rina has taken on Aron’s strict Orthodox lifestyle. Fun is not on the agenda. At Aron’s insistence, Szonja begins Hebrew lessons at the family’s synagogue, but she does not warm to the religious lifestyle, and she is resentful of the changes she witnesses in her sister. Exercising her own freedom, she engages in a quick fling that results in her becoming pregnant.
Due to return to Hungary, Szonja elects instead to overstay her tourist visa and establish herself in Los Angeles. She gives birth to a daughter, Mila, and raises her alone.
Moving forward to the dominant timeline, it is 2001. Szonja has become Sonia, and Mila is a 10-year-old wise beyond her years. Witty and resourceful, Sonia has managed to eke out a life, with bills in other people’s names, a fictitious marriage to come as close as she can get to legal immigration status, and a shady line of work in the supply chain that furnishes popular electronic items to the East European black market, for which she occasionally drafts Mila as an accomplice.
Sonia stays aloof from the nosy and overly involved parents at the elementary school Mila attends. And, despite living in the same city, she has had no contact with her sister Rina since clashing with her a decade earlier. Mila has been raised without any connection to family, and without knowledge of her origins.
A prying Mila finds an email exchange between Sonia and a man in San Francisco whom Mila suspects of being her biological father. She engineers a scenario in which Sonia will serve as chaperone for an upcoming trip the school orchestra is taking from L.A. to San Francisco, in hopes of staging an unlikely family reunion unbeknownst to her mother.
The ensuing trip conforms to neither Mila’s nor Sonia’s expectations, but, with Sonia seeming to acknowledge chinks in her armor, it helps set the stage for greater honesty and new opportunities in their relationship.
That’s roughly the plot, but this isn’t a plot-defined novel.
More than anything, it feels like a deep character study of someone who’d be loath to allow anyone close enough to undertake such a character study.
What is particularly haunting about Sonia’s determination to maintain a controlled distance from others is how it also ensnares Mila. In fact, the novel begins with Sonia tutoring 6-year-old Mila on her first day of school in the art of limiting the information she reveals to others. Testing her, she asks, “And any follow-up questions, then what do we say?” to which Mila utters the correct response: “Mind your own business.”
This wariness and secrecy have become such a way of life for Sonia over time that she fails to recognize the price it has exacted for Mila, who is unable to establish friendships.
Sonia’s self-protective impulse reflects the challenges of life as a single mother and undocumented immigrant who cannot afford to take risks. But it is apparent that it is also tied to Sonia’s particular background: the enduring memory of totalitarianism, and the anxieties associated with being Jewish in 20th-century Europe.
Sonia’s parents suppressed all conversation around the Holocaust that destroyed most of their families. They also kept the family’s Jewishness from their children — Sonia and Rina learned of their identity only upon having it pointed out to them unkindly on a Budapest street. The need to maintain secrets, along with the lying that is necessary to do so, crossed the Atlantic with Sonia.
Judaism plays a role in “Porcupines” beyond simply being a source of fear and trauma. When Sonia’s sister Rina dives into Jewish practice (an act that angers and alienates her fervent communist father, who despises religion), she is embracing a freedom that she was unable to experience in Hungary. But Sonia finds in Rina’s life of rigid observance and domesticity an utter lack of freedom.
Fabriczki grew up in Hungary, but spent a portion of her childhood in Los Angeles before returning to Budapest and eventually moving to London in adulthood. The fact that she is writing in her second language is remarkable, but it feels as if an outsider’s power of observation is part of the book’s magic. The narrative voice frequently echoes Sonia’s snark and cynicism, often to humorous effect.
For those who prefer linear storytelling and tidy resolutions, the book may prove frustrating. But its picture of a deeply bound mother-daughter relationship that is inextricable from both the small forces within families and the bigger forces of history has stayed with me.