If that encourages you to buy the book, more power to the copywriter. You won’t be sorry you did. We at the Reader are as proud of Lee Sandlin as we are of any writer whom we feel we can say we introduced. The Distancers is Sandlin’s third book from a commercial press since 2010, and the first that originated in our pages. But what he actually has to say about family is how strange it is. And from this strangeness came the author.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Sandlin’s story is rooted in the summers he passed as a child at his mother’s ancestral home in Edwardsville, Illinois. “My grandfather grew up there, and it’s where my mother spent her summers when she was a kid. By the time of my childhood it had been firmly established as a kind of private sleepaway camp for our family. . . . Our parents would . . . leave us for weeks or sometimes months at a time.” Why his parents would do that isn’t clear—except that Sandlin’s mother, Dorothy, was treated the same way by her parents, Clarence and Mary Sehnart, who drove them down from Chicago as soon as school let out. “Clarence and Mary were usually so restless to get back on the road,” Sandlin writes, “they wouldn’t even stick around for dinner. Today, asked where her parents went, Dorothy expels a long, slow sigh and says, ‘I have absolutely no idea.’”
So what is The Distancers—a tribute to the kin who brought the love that made the author bloom? Not exactly. At some point Sandlin—who’s indicated he’s crosswise with most of his family on this one—began to wonder, who are these people? He realized he knew nothing about the four of them, not even how they were related, and that this was how they wanted it. Their lives were no one’s business, certainly not his. They lived to be unknowable, as if perhaps they had so little self-regard they felt there was too little of themselves to share. Sandlin’s inquiries led him to conclude that actual happiness hadn’t been in the picture. Helen was a spinster dying on the vine; Hilda endured—because that is woman’s lot—a loveless, childless marriage to Marty, a deadbeat Helen silently abhorred since the time he’d tried to kiss her. As for Eugene, always preternaturally quiet, he was so traumatized by whatever happened to him during the war in the Pacific he was almost incapable of any speech at all and spent his days puttering in the lavish gardens he’d installed out back. What’s more, Eugene’s contempt for Marty was so overwhelming he finally punched him in the face and for the rest of his life refused to acknowledge his existence.
Families are only either happy or unhappy when they’re not yours.
