Following their progress is often exciting. The work done by “The Hand That First Held Mine” is to discover what happens when it snares Lexie and Elina in its toils.
O’Farrell suggests more about their similarities than their differences.Īt first, this makes the twinning of their stories a bit mysterious, but eventually, a carefully controlled series of hints and accidents suggests what the connection might be. They are scarcely unique, and though 35 years separates the births of their sons, Ms. Here are two young women, both involved in the art world, both with babies, both living in London. They seem to be lost childhood memories, and they sidetrack him so much that Elina’s worries about him compound with the endless work of the baby to overwhelm her with anxiety.Īs attention switches from Lexie to Elina and back again, readers look for links. As the weeks pass and Elina slowly recovers, he suffers visual distortions and sudden mental flashes of unknown people. Ted, the baby’s father, is so shaken by Elina’s near death in the delivery room that he can’t bear to think about it. She has lost so much blood that she is scarcely functioning and cannot even really remember giving birth. As Lexie’s life progresses through the ‘60s and ‘70s, alternating chapters switch attention to the modern-day story of painter Elina Vilkuna, who has just arrived home from the hospital with her baby, born after three days’ labor, a Caesarean and a hemorrhage. She has an on-off relationship with a TV reporter, and eventually a child, Theo, who becomes the new center of her life. In time, she establishes herself as an art critic.
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