But all utopias have their victims, and in The Children’s House it is the protagonist, Marina, the daughter of a Polish Holocaust survivor, Gizela, who suffers under the yoke of collective education alongside her brother Dov. Gizela’s relinquishment of her children in the kibbutz produces a lifelong anxiety in Marina and her brother; the siblings grow up pining for affection, while Gizela remains unrelentingly aloof and eventually disappears from their lives altogether. By the novel’s opening, Marina is an adult, having forged a comfortable life for herself in New York in spite of her difficult and peripatetic childhood. A renowned academic at Columbia, she is writing a monograph on the Hasidic movement in the United States. Her husband, Jacob, is a successful psychiatrist with a practice in Chelsea. She has tried and failed to have children, but is stepmother to Jacob’s moody son, Ben. Riding the crest of Harlem’s gentrification in the late 1990s, the family has moved into a brownstone that formerly housed an order of nuns.

Marina’s vexed relationship with motherhood comes into sharp relief when she meets Constance, a twenty-year-old Rwandan refugee who has moved into the projects with her son Gabriel. As Marina grows more attached to Gabriel and more alarmed by Constance’s flat affect and lack of mothering instincts, her attempts to become the pair’s benevolent protector are tinged with both maternal zeal and liberal crusaderism. Marina identifies an English language class for Constance to attend, buys her groceries, and masquerades as her case worker. She also picks up Constance’s maternal slack, taking Gabriel on excursions to the Natural History Museum and the zoo. In these encounters, Constance remains frustratingly opaque as a character: while her seeming indifference is clearly a product of her trauma, her passivity and silence render her a cipher that the novel struggles to endow with convincing humanity.

Not so for Marina and her husband Jacob: the portrayal of their family life is where Nelson is most proficient. The intimacies of marriage and the ripples of disagreement between Jacob and Marina about how to handle Ben’s errancy are handled with insight and subtlety, as is Marina’s grief when a piece of devastating news lobs into her mailbox. The novel is studded with poetic observations of domestic life: Marina sees a pair of shoes suspended from a wire outside, ‘aloft and swaying gently in the wind … [like] an entreaty’; later, she watches ‘the soft roll of [rain] against the dusty window’. While the surfeit of detail hampers the narrative pace at times, Nelson skilfully evokes the textures of a gentrifying Harlem, and probes Marina’s presence as yet another interloper changing the face of the historically black neighbourhood.

Yet as the neighbourhood hurtles into the future, Marina increasingly dwells in the past, spurred by her observations of Constance to revisit her own fraught relationship with her mother Gizela. The resultant lengthy passages of recapitulative exposition about life in the children’s house – the most fascinating aspect of the novel – lack urgency or crisis, relegated as they are to Marina’s childhood. And as the parallels between Constance’s mothering and Gizela’s become clearer, so too does Nelson’s bald restatement of the connections: we are told that ‘Gizela did not know how to be a mother’; elsewhere, that ‘Constance had retreated into a terrible blankness’, among many other explicit and clichéd pronouncements. Nelson’s inclination towards such summation is unfortunate; more often than not, the reader is told, rather than shown or convinced, what drives her characters. Constance and Gizela suffer from this most of all; the weight of their respective symbolic roles often outweighs their distinction as individuals.

Alice Nelson (photo by Nicole Boenig-McGrade) Perhaps unavoidably, the links Nelson draws between Gizela and Constance become implicit comparisons or metaphors likening the suffering endured by Holocaust survivors with that of those who lived through the Rwandan genocide. We are told of Holocaust survivors: ‘Perhaps their ability to love their children in the old ways had been scoured out of them, along with everything else.’ And of the surviving Rwandans: ‘Each face had the same look of mute incomprehension, the same blank stare. It was the look that Constance bore.’ But while Nelson’s novel offers some insight into the lives of kibbutzniks and the intergenerational trauma wrought by the Holocaust, it is ultimately unsuccessful at grappling with the horrors of the Rwandan civil war. Perhaps out of trepidation, Nelson rarely adopts Constance’s perspective; when she does, she offers scant insight into Constance’s interior life or what lies behind her traumatised silence. At one point, Marina observes of Constance: ‘Whatever might have sharpened her devotion to the child in Rwanda, seemed to have sunk away, like the rest of her, into irretrievable depths.’ In the end, Marina’s failure to comprehend Constance becomes the author’s. I only wish that Nelson had tried harder to bring Constance to the surface.