Some 20 years ago, a cobweb descended over my right eye. What I thought was a migraine, turned out to be a semi-detached retina. Even saying those words now makes me flinch.
After surgery, I lay still for days on my side, eye patch in place. Back then, my husband and daughter went to our local library to find books on tape for me. Since I'd reviewed Allegra Goodman's novel Intuition just before this scary event happened, they brought home cassettes of two of Goodman's earlier novels: Kaaterskill Falls and The Family Markowitz.
I was lucky and my sight recovered, so I now think of that interlude of being marooned on the couch listening to Goodman's novels unspool as one of the most idyllic reading experiences of my life. Which is why, even though I've kept up with Goodman's work, I was hesitant to read her new novel, This Is Not About Us.
Most of her books have explored intense and enclosed worlds: from the labs of cancer researchers in Intuition, to rare book zealots in The Cookbook Collector, to the island prison of a 16th-century castaway in last year's Isola. This Is Not About Us, however, is different: It's a throwback, in form and subject to The Family Markowitz, which came out 30 years ago.
Both novels are domestic tales about three generations of a Jewish family and both are structured as a series of linked stories in which various family members take center stage. I worried that returning to a familiar formula might mean that Goodman was running out of energy as a writer. Then, I started reading and stopped worrying.
When I finished This Is Not About Us — I kid you not — I read it a second time, just to savor all the interconnections, all the shifts in family members' opinions of each other.
This Is Not About Us opens at the prolonged deathbed of Jeanne who, at 74, is the youngest of the three Rubenstein sisters. Jeanne's house is packed with flowers:
[T]he sunflowers from her daughter-in law, Melanie, the roses from the Auerbachs next door. ...
The flowers depressed her, especially those already wilting. When she looked at the mums, she felt she wasn’t dying fast enough.
Sardonic Jeanne does inevitably depart and that's when the mood here darkens — not because of her death, but because of an apple cake that middle sister Sylvia serves at Jeanne's shiva. The apple cake recipe originally came from the eldest Rubinstein sister, Helen, but Helen is not a gifted baker like Sylvia.
When Sylvia entices the entire extended family to gather around a Bundt cake that emits the warm sweet fragrance of apples, Helen storms out of the shiva. And she refuses to forgive Sylvia for ... well, Goodman postpones the emotionally overwhelming ending to this preposterous and painful family rift till the very last pages of her novel.
The 17 chapters of This Is Not About Us can stand as independent stories, but they accrue power from the subtle ways in which they alter our initial impressions of family members. "Deal Breaker," for example, focuses on Helen's older daughter Pam who's in her early 50s and single. In an earlier story, another character describes Pam as: "a black hole"; someone who "[a]t the best of times, ... looked askance."
But in "Deal Breaker," we see Pam cut to the quick when she realizes the man she loves will always put his ex-wife and teenaged daughter first. That's when her mother Helen's superhuman ability to hold a grudge (remember the apple cake?) becomes a quality that fortifies Pam.
Talking with her parents about the reason for the break-up, Pam struggles to characterize her ex-boyfriend's steadfast loyalty to his ex-wife and daughter. She asks her mother for the word that describes those trees that hold onto their leaves all winter:
“‘Marcescent,’ says Helen, because she knows the word for everything. She is such a puzzler.
“That’s how he is,” Pam tells [her parents].
“Good for him,” says Helen, and Pam knows she means good riddance. ...
Pam can’t help but admire her mother’s clarity.
Helen is difficult. She’s daunting, but she’s crisp.
She never clings.
Goodman herself is pretty "marcescent" as a writer. She holds fast to the gifts that have marked her since her earliest books: psychological acuity, humor and an abiding curiosity about the volatile chemistry of people bound together by affinity, profession or blood.
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