Noble jobs help a mother and son avoid each other, until they can’t

Peter Fischer buries his personal demons in work, work and more work. An immigration lawyer in Manhattan, his job is one long emergency: He advocates for asylees seeking legal standing and safe harbor in America. Success means a new and far more secure life. Failure means deportation.

Peter’s mother, Ann, has taken on another bottomless vocation, though in more serene surroundings: She runs a spiritual retreat in Vermont aimed at helping women — discouraged, alienated or traumatized — achieve a sense of community and self-worth. She has a gift for getting others to connect with their pain, even as she buries her own.

Both are deeply invested in a life of service. Both share a secret. And for both mother and son, a reckoning is coming.

In “Mothers and Sons,” acclaimed novelist Adam Haslett tells the story of this pair with acute empathy and insight. The author of three previous works of fiction, two of them Pulitzer Prize finalists, (2016’s “Imagine Me Gone” and 2002’s story collection “You Are Not a Stranger Here”), there’s no better writer at chronicling the highs and lows of familial love. In “Mothers and Sons,” Haslett shows a family both torn by past trauma and battered by the social turmoil of the present.

For Peter, the demon that drives his workaholism lies in his past: As a teenager, he wrestled with submerged desires and eventually realized he was gay. Then, in the middle of his father’s and mother’s split over Ann’s love for another woman, Peter’s crush on the enchanting and charismatic Jared went catastrophically bad. Ann’s decision to leave her husband both fractured the family and ended her vocation as an Episcopal priest.

Peter’s job blocks his memories and serves as an excuse both to avoid entangling relationships and to turn down Ann’s invitations to meet. Every case demands a cram course in the politics of his client’s country of origin and the abuse that led him or her to flee. In immigration court, a missed deadline can mean arrest and deportation, and deportation can be fatal for those who are political refugees. There are children whose lives may be wrecked, and clients who despair their case’s outcome and simply disappear. Peter is the last line of defense for clients from Honduras, Russia, Nepal and Albania.

Haslett has a law degree and has done volunteer immigration work, and I have never read a more informed and vividly rendered account of Peter’s daunting profession, a job that in real life seems likely to become more punishing with the incoming presidential administration’s promised crackdown on immigration.

Peter endures the pressure, until Vasel, a young Albanian refugee who was almost killed for being gay, pierces his defenses and revives Peter’s long-ago trauma. He begins to make mistakes, and mistakes can have life-altering consequences.

Like Peter, Ann is a helper, and like Peter, her idealism tends to blind her to everyday demands. Peter recalls bitterly: “My father could be dying in the other room, yet still it was the printed word that absorbed her. As if this life — our life — were an interruption of the real meaning of things.” The viability of the retreat center depends on Ann and her partner, but their hard-won serenity is threatened when Ann becomes attracted to another woman.

The mother and son seem destined for a permanent estrangement, but six years after their last meeting, Ann’s home is where Peter heads when his vulnerability and isolation turn physical. He slowly moves back toward his family. It’s not an easy passage, as each peels back layers of sadness, guilt and resentment in search of long-buried affection. At times the members of this family interrogate their own and others’ motives so harshly, I longed for a little more gentleness. Peter’s sister Liz, a free spirit with a toddler and a gamer husband, provides comic relief from the knives-out quality of some family encounters. I would have welcomed more of her, and more of the quotidian of both Peter’s and Ann’s lives.

A subplot about one of Ann’s Revolutionary War ancestors who is complicit in genocide doesn’t really go anywhere. But Haslett’s portrayal of Ann and Peter is matchless, and other mother-son pairs echo the ferocity of their bond: Vasel’s fiercely protective mother; a Honduran client whose son will do anything to protect her; Liz and her exuberant little boy; Jared and his stylish, enigmatic mother.

Despite avoidance, blame and accusations, a spark of longing for reconciliation survives. “Mothers and Sons” documents an emotional odyssey that in the end feels satisfying and real, and Haslett’s account of Peter’s life is unparalleled in its portrayal of a worker on the front lines of our immigration wars buckling under the weight of his burden. He and Ann both vividly portray the costs of selflessness at the expense of the self.

In the end, the chronicle of this complex mother and son pair satisfies one of the best reasons to read fiction: to understand others and their impossible burdens, to mourn when they stumble and celebrate when they survive.

Mary Ann Gwinn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who lives in Seattle, writes about books and authors.