"My mother's unvarying composure, I sometimes thought, stemmed from a genuine deficiency of emotion," Alexander Kinloch comments early in the book.

He never saw her cry, "never heard tears in her voice," not even when his father—her first husband—was killed in a shooting accident, a devastating loss to the seventeen-year-old boy. He recalls that, dry-eyed, she had advised him to pull himself together. A year later, when she remarries, Alexander reports that she was "cool at the ceremony." Although Vivienne Westering's cool correctness informs her relationship with everyone, not only her son, the disinclination to display emotion may reflect her upbringing rather than an innate absence of feeling. Late in the novel, when Ivan dies and Alexander rushes to Vivienne's side, he says: "My mother wept. I held her tight while she shook with near-silent sobs, the grief deep and terrible." He naturally wonders...