Fran Fabriczki’s debut novel, Porcupines, explores questions about family, self-knowledge, and self-invention. What do we owe to the people that we love the most? How have they shaped us? What are the consequences of our decisions? How well do we know ourselves, and let others know us?
One of the strengths of Porcupines is the humor and appeal of its protagonist, Szonja in her native Hungary and redubbed Sonia when she makes Los Angeles her home at eighteen — an age, Fabriczki informs the reader, when Sonia “had not had the least idea what she wanted.” She’s a lively, independent woman when the novel opens, single mother to six-year-old Mila, with little interest in the suburban mothers in Mila’s school and their quotidian concerns. She instructs Mila to tell anyone who asks that “your mother works in an office, and you’re not Russian …” If there are more questions, Mila is to say, “Mind your own business.” Sonia sports a leather jacket and Ray-Ban sunglasses, she doesn’t join the other parents at Mila’s swim practice, there’s no man present in this family of two. Who is the father, the other parents wonder, what does Sonia do between school drop off and pick up? We, the readers, are propelled along by the same questions.
Six years later, at eleven, Mila is waking up to her own agency. In Mila we find a character whose curiosity is a worthy match for her mother’s recalcitrance. Mila is determined to unearth her mother’s secrets — the identity of her father primary among them. Just how she does this launches a series of adventures that keeps mother, daughter, and the reader guessing.
Porcupines jumps between the ’80s, ’90’s and the early aughts. The settings range from Budapest to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and regions nearby. Sonia’s mother is sensitively portrayed in an uneasy marriage with her diplomat husband; her sister, Rina, is given a wide berth to explore Judaism in ways surprising and inexplicable to Sonia. We meet a Jewish family in Los Angeles that opens Sonia’s eyes to family life unlike the one she grew up with. Once, Sonia knew her mother’s favorite soap opera, her favorite soda, the magazine she liked to read. Now, she is no longer in touch with her family, and Fabriczki’s achievement is to make the reader care.
Accustomed to operating on her own, afraid of accommodating a husband and losing herself, one of the more poignant moments in the novel is when Sonia meets another mother at the playground when Mila is three. Up until then, Mila has spoken very little. The other mother hides her surprise and asks Sonia if she has taken her daughter to a speech pathologist. Sonia would like to ask this mother what a speech pathologist does and whether it is too late to take Mila to one now, but all she can manage is “No.” What she would really have liked to say when the woman hands her a referral is, “Stay here and tell me how to do this.”
When this affecting novel comes to its well-earned conclusion, Sonia will know what she wants, and what she wants for Mila.
Susan Moldaw’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Broad Street, Cutleaf Journal, Fourth Genre, Narrative, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Sweet Lit, The Millions, and others. She sings with the Threshold Choir and is a retired chaplain.
