Book review - Voyage round her father

THERE'S A RUBBER REPLICA OF A human brain on Siri Hustvedt's desk in the New York home she shares with her husband, novelist Paul Auster. Perched on a little stand, the brain can be taken apart and its hemispheres explored.

"It's not quite refined enough for every purpose, though," explains Hustvedt, who has become obsessed with the study of the brain of late. It is part of what she calls "a great adventure" – the intensive and extensive research she undertakes before starting to write.

Her latest novel, The Sorrows of an American, is narrated by a man – as was her last, the international bestseller What I Loved. It is an absorbing study of secrets passed down the generations of an immigrant Norwegian-American family and is written from the perspective of a divorced psychiatrist, Erik Davidsen, who discovers a mysterious reference to an unknown woman among his late father Lars's papers. "I think we all have ghosts inside us, and it's better when they speak than when they don't," Erik writes.

The passages in the book from Lars's memoir are taken directly from the text of Hustvedt's own father's memoir, written for family and friends before his death in February, 2003. Towards the end of his life, Lloyd Hustvedt, a Norwegian-American professor of Scandinavian literature, agreed that his daughter might use his memories in the novel she had begun thinking about. So, notes Hustvedt, posthumously, her father became her collaborator. Some of his stories she has used verbatim, others are freely mingled with imaginary ones.

"My father had a long, slow death – he had emphysema – and I guess Sorrows is a book that I wrote out of grief for him. It was a kind of necessary book because of his death. I keep going back and forth about whether writing about death helps. I think there's a need to do it. Certainly, writing releases some kind of energy, although it's not cathartic. I spent years with my father's memoir. He'd also written a family history and I had his diary. I took direct quotes from the 15-year-old boy he'd been.

"When the book, which is not one I could have written when he was alive, was done, I was able to close all that material and put it on my shelf; I think that was a kind of sign. But it was extremely hard to come to terms with my father's death. The helplessness … he was so aware he was dying."

Sorrows is set after 9/11 and the shadow of that event hangs over it, although Hustvedt was determined not to fetishise it – "horrifying as it was". She links that trauma to other, more personal ones, such as her father's wartime experiences and the sadness of his poverty-stricken childhood in Minnesota during the Great Depression.

"His childhood haunted him his whole life. It was hard for him to reconcile the impoverished farmboy and the professor. But I don't feel that I've betrayed my father in any way," she says.

"For him, though, there was a sense of class betrayal. He married my mother, Ester, this very middle-class Norwegian girl who grew up in an almost 19th-century Norway, with maids and so on, a very different world. In fact, Erik's mother in the book very much resembles my mother, who has just turned 85, although this is a book about fathers, not mothers."

As Erik and his sister Inga attempt to unearth their father's repressed secrets, Erik becomes obsessed with a beautiful, secretive Jamaican artist who rents a room from him for herself and her daughter. They are being stalked by someone who photographs them incessantly.

There are enigmatic mysteries and profound puzzles in the novel, which uses many of the tropes and obsessions that give her work its disturbing emotional power. These include rooms, dolls, missing limbs, mirrors, violence, nameless threats, the comfort of order and the distress of ambiguity. "I've no idea where all this comes from," says Hustvedt, laughing merrily as I tick off this list.

An art critic, she has written of the great artist Louise Bourgeois that she can take you to strange and hidden places in yourself: "This is her gift." It is also Hustvedt's gift, since the 53-year-old readily confesses that all her own work is "emotionally autobiographical".

"The autobiographical thing is an itch I can't get rid of," she says. "It's something ambiguous, often frightening. There's also a hallucinatory aspect to my work. For me, writing is about altered states."

In her collection of essays, A Plea for Eros, she has written of how she can't remember a time when she did not carry around inside her a sensation of being wounded. Her interest in identity, she believes, may have been fuelled by the crippling attacks of migraine that started when she was in high school and for which she has been hospitalised – once, after she had fallen in love with Auster, for over a year.

Or perhaps it comes from the fact that she was born prematurely. For the first two weeks of her life she lay incubated and isolated, untouched by human hands, before it became clear that she would live. In "Extracts from a Story of the Wounded Self", one of a dozen essays in Eros, she writes: "We can't remember our infancies, but they live in our bodies and had I not been frail at birth I would have been someone else, and I would have had other thoughts."

Research she undertook into the psyche for The Sorrows of an American – learning she wears lightly in the novel – led her to attend monthly lectures by psychoanalysts, psychiatrists and neuroscientists. Then she joined one of their discussion groups, which she still attends, although she says she has never been in analysis herself. She also read clinical studies of neurobiology, early childhood development and neuropsychoanalysis.

Her researches led her to New York's Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, where she works as a volunteer, teaching writing to inpatients. "Teaching that class has been the most powerful experience for me," she says. Without her students she would not have felt nearly so close to the stories of people battling the pain of mental illness.

"Paul thought I would stop when I finished the book, but I love it. It's emotionally draining – I come home exhausted. My students love Emily Dickinson, for instance. Such a difficult poet. But the psychotic and manic patients, especially, respond to her. Their work is amazing. The words pour out of them; it's thrilling.

"For me, there is the most tremendous curiosity about this material. I did it not just for the novel but because it gives me pleasure," she says. She got as involved in research for What I Loved, investigating female hysteria and eating disorders. "I read a lot about psychology for that book," she agrees, recalling how she had to smuggle vast tomes on the subject past her husband.

Her orderly, top-floor study contains shelves full of medical, pharmacological and psychiatric dictionaries – as well as all 34 volumes of the Grove Dictionary of Art. We are sitting, though, in the family's large living room, with its gleaming wooden floors and lovingly polished antique furniture, avant-garde art and cabinets of curiosities. She may write obsessively about emotional chaos but Hustvedt lives amid perfect order.

It would be so easy to envy her. She looks like a Scandinavian ice maiden: six feet tall, slender as a reed, blonde, blue-eyed – and brainy. And she is married to one of America's finest writers, who is tall, dark and handsome to boot. Perhaps the most glamorous couple of American letters, the Austers have a 20-year-old daughter, Sophie, an aspiring actor and singer-songwriter, whose voice is as beautiful as her looks. I know this because Auster gave me a copy of her first CD in 2006, for which he had written some of the lyrics.

While it seems Hustvedt has it all, however, it's impossible to feel jealous because she's so light-hearted and warm, and such a pleasure to meet. Her lively, funny conversation is like her elegant prose, positively fizzing with ideas about life, literature and art.

One of four intellectually gifted, strikingly beautiful sisters, the Columbia University graduate finds the amount of column inches devoted to her own looks distracting. She used to believe it led to her being taken less seriously.

"It doesn't matter how good your brain, women are always treated as objects, especially beautiful women. You know, I'm actually a very, very serious girl," she says, with an ironic smile. Indeed, in her essay collection Yonder she writes about being an adolescent who read Karl Marx – but who was also capable of wriggling into a pair of tight jeans to pursue a boy she fancied.

"The perfect face and body can be a burden as well as dangerous weapons," she murmurs, pulling errant wisps of hair away from her face, which is innocent of make-up. Her looks have, though, been part of her armour.

As a teenager, in Garrison Keillor country in Minnesota, she became aware of her ability to turn heads. "I would walk down the street and people would stare. I used to think, is the zipper on my jeans open? Do I have a dirty face?

"Then I realised that it was because of the way I looked. It was most disconcerting. Now all that has come to my daughter, who is much better looking than I am. Sophie's really lovely."

Only about five years ago did Hustvedt – whose next novel is about a group of women – feel that she had finally grown into her face. "I'm happier with the way I look now than I've ever been," she says, with all the nonchalance of a woman who is still – as Shakespeare noted of Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing – worth the whistle.

• The Sorrows of an American by Siri Hustvedt is published by Sceptre, priced £16.99.