When Erik Davidsen and his sister, Inga, find a disturbing note among their late father's papers, they believe he may be implicated in a mysterious death. The Sorrows of an American tells the story of the Davidsen family as brother and sister unbandage its wounds in the year following their father’s funeral. Erik is a psychiatrist dangerously vulnerable to his patients; Inga is a writer whose late husband, a famous novelist, seems to have concealed a secret life. Interwoven with each new mystery in their lives are discoveries about their father’s youth--poverty, the War, the Depression--that bring new implications to his relationship with his children.


This masterful novel reveals one family’s hidden sorrows in an "elegant meditation on familial grief, memory, and imagination" (Minneapolis Star-Tribune).


Siri Hustvedt is the author of three previous novels, What I Loved, The Blindfold, and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, as well as a collection of essays, A Plea for Eros. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Paul Auster. Longlisted for the International IMPAC Literary Award


The Sorrows of an American is a story about the immigrant experience and the ghosts that haunt families from one generation to another. When psychiatrist Erik Davidsen and his sister, Inga, find a disturbing note from an unknown woman among their dead father’s papers, they believe he may be implicated in a mysterious death. Starting with the note, brother and sister uncover the Davidsen family's secrets and unbandage its wounds in the year following their father’s funeral.


The grieving siblings return to New York from Minnesota, and they continue to pursue the mystery behind the note. While Erik struggles with emotional vulnerability to his psychiatric patients and his fascination with new tenants in his building threatens to overwhelm him, Inga is confronted by a hostile journalist who seems to know a secret connected to her dead husband, who was a famous novelist. As each new mystery unfolds, Erik begins to inhabit his emotionally hidden father’s history and to glimpse how his impoverished childhood, the Depression, and the war shaped his relationship with his children. At the same time, Inga must confront the reality of her husband’s double life.


The Sorrows of an American is a novel about fathers and children; listening and deafness; recognition and blindness; the pain of speaking and the pain of keeping silent; and the ambiguities of memory, loneliness, illness, and recovery. Siri Hustvedt’s prose reveals one family’s hidden sorrows through a mosaic of secrets and stories that reflect the fragmented nature of identity itself. "Hustvedt's descriptions of the immigrant experience and the Minnesota landscape have a spare Scandinavian elegance, while her account of the life of a Brooklyn psychoanalyst feels quietly authentic. She takes unapologetic delight in intellectual characters who understand their lives through far-ranging reading and lively conversation . . . she proves herself a writer deftly able to weave intricate ideas into an intriguing plot."—Sylvia Brownrigg, The New York Times "The Sorrows of an American is a thought-provoking book that offers pleasures across many different registers. Hustvedt's descriptions of the immigrant experience and the Minnesota landscape have a spare Scandinavian elegance, while her account of the life of a Brooklyn psychoanalyst feels quietly authentic. She takes unapologetic delight in intellectual characters who understand their lives through far-ranging reading and lively conversation . . . Hustvedt explored the milieu of New York writers and academics in her last novel, What I Loved—in fact, Leo Hertzberg, that book's art-historian narrator, appears briefly at a dinner party at Inga's apartment—and here again she proves herself a writer deftly able to weave intricate ideas into an intriguing plot."—Sylvia Brownrigg, The New York Times


"A jarring, long-echoing evocation of the existential vertigo induced by the loss of those whom we miss most desperately, and thus of our place in their world."—Ben Dickinson, Elle


"One of the most profound and absorbing books I've read in a long time. Hustvedt pushes hard on what a novel can do and what a reader can absorb, but once you fall into this captivating story the experience will make you feel alternately inadequate and brilliant—and finally deeply grateful . . . Hustvedt seems unwilling to turn away any tangential character; she practices a kind of authorial hospitality that gives the book an ever-growing list of side stories. Not the least of these is told in arresting excerpts from the memoir by Erik's father that describes his childhood during the Depression and his experiences as a soldier in World War II. Erik studies this manuscript with rapt attention, knowing it contains the best chance of understanding his heritage and perhaps his own troubled soul as well. Hustvedt reveals in the acknowledgments that these stirring passages from the senior Davidsen's memoir were, in fact, taken almost verbatim from her own late father's memoir, making The Sorrows of an American a striking demonstration of its own theme: the blending of fiction and nonfiction that gives coherence to our lives . . . Hustvedt elegantly knits together these subplots, often from different genres: elements of the thriller, the hospital drama, the historical novel and even the spy caper and noir film, along with autobiographical, philosophy, letters, case studies and art criticism . . . This is a radically postmodern novel that wears its po-mo credentials with unusual grace; even at its strangest moments, it never radiates the chilly alienation that marks, say, the work of Hustvedt's husband, Paul Auster. The remarkable conclusion of The Sorrows is a four-page recapitulation of the story's images racing through Erik's mind—and ours. It's a stunning, Joycean demonstration that invites us to impose some sense of meaning on a disparate collection of events, to satisfy our lust for 'a world that makes sense.' I reached the end emotionally and intellectually exhausted, knowing how much I'll miss this book."—Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book World


"In a poignant opening scene of Siri Hustvedt's fourth novel, Erik Davidsen cleans out his deceased father's desk. He finds a ring of keys meticulously labeled 'unknown,' which symbolizes the secrets that Lars, his father, has left behind. Erik and his sister, Inga, also find an unfinished memoir and a letter. The memoir, which is quoted throughout the novel, helps establish the pace of the story and is a window into his father's life before marriage and a family . . . The meditative tone of the book is poetry at its best; the language has resonance and meter and meaning. Its cadence is often in sharp contrast to bustling New York City and its inhabitants. But it is in describing Erik's pastoral Minnesota hometown that Hustvedt, a native Minnesotan, is at her best . . . Memories are as alive as the present in this book. They produce sensory scenes where characters eavesdrop into their own lives as well as into the lives of their ancestors. But the book isn't all about the interior. The characters are very much alive. Hustvedt provides nicely drawn details of both the intimate and mundane in their day-to-day lives, and she clearly has done meticulous research into psy