Arlene McKanic

FictionHistorical Fiction

Behind every great man is a fed-up woman

Review by Arlene McKanic

Like so many male genius-types, Albert Einstein’s behavior toward at least one woman who supported him was revolting. Fortunately, Marie Benedict’s tragic, crisply told novel isn’t about Albert, but about his Serbian, almost-as-brilliant first wife, Mileva Marić, who narrates it. The two met at Zurich Polytechnic as students in 1896, embarked on a passionate affair and launched a turbulent, 13-year marriage in 1903.

To be blunt, Benedict’s exploration of this unfortunate woman’s life makes you mad, and that’s probably the point. What really burns one up isn’t reading page after page about how ill-used Marić was by her philandering husband, or how thoroughly he derailed her career and life, but the knowledge that this story isn’t entirely a relic of the past. Somewhere in the world—yes, even in the United States of America in the year 2016—there is another young woman like Mileva Marić, whose promising future is crushed by domesticity and an ambitious, selfish partner.

At least, the way this story unfolds in The Other Einstein, Marić has the wisdom to dump Einstein before he dumps her. But even that scene isn’t a moment of feminist triumph. Worn out from years of childbearing and housekeeping, Marić becomes a single mom with few prospects, burdened by the stigma of divorce. 

Benedict does take liberties with her story: The Other Einstein is a novel and not a biography. Her speculations on how much Marić contributed to her husband’s work and what happened to their first child, born before their marriage and lost to history in the real world, are thought-provoking, if unable to be substantiated. There’s no doubt this is a novel that will inspire strong emotion in its readers. And it carries a warning: Hold on to your dreams, and find someone who’ll support them even as you support theirs. 

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Behind the Book essay from Marie Benedict on The Other Einstein.

Like so many male genius-types, Albert Einstein’s behavior toward at least one woman who supported him was revolting. Fortunately, Marie Benedict’s tragic, crisply told novel isn’t about Albert, but about his Serbian, almost-as-brilliant first wife, Mileva Marić, who narrates it. The two met at Zurich Polytechnic as students in 1896, embarked on a passionate affair and launched a turbulent, 13-year marriage in 1903.

FictionHistorical Fiction

The Wonder

Review by Arlene McKanic

Is Emma Donoghue cultivating a new genre? Call it “emergency motherhood.” Like her 2010 bestseller, Room, Donoghue’s ninth novel features a woman whose existence is bent around the life, health and happiness of a child whose circumstances are desperate.

The Wonder is set in Catholic Ireland, just after the ravages of the potato famine. Little Anna O’Donnell has survived months without food, leading the townspeople to believe she is a miracle. Due to her fame, the diocese where she and her family live assigns a nurse and a nun to watch her around the clock. The nurse is Lib Wright, a British veteran of the Crimean War who was personally trained by Florence Nightingale. The nun is a shadow of a creature called Sister Michael. Anxiously watching and waiting are Anna’s parents.

Lib, a no-nonsense type, assumes something dodgy is going on. After months of nothing but spoonfuls of water, Anna should be dead. Then, under the eyes of Lib and the nun, Anna does begin to die in earnest. This prompts a battle between Lib and Anna’s mother: In Donoghue’s world, those who haven’t given birth—Lib had a baby who died in infancy—just don’t get it. Virginal Sister Michael and the servant girl are compassionate but befuddled. The men are useless. The conflict can only end in catastrophe. Or maybe, to use Tolkien’s word, a eucatastrophe.

Donoghue’s strength is the fierceness with which she approaches her subject matter, and The Wonder sometimes reaches Exorcist-level intensity as Lib and Mrs. O’Donnell contend over Anna’s body and soul. Suspenseful and compelling, the story will keep readers turning pages.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Is Emma Donoghue cultivating a new genre? Call it “emergency motherhood.” Like her 2010 bestseller, Room, Donoghue’s ninth novel features a woman whose existence is bent around the life, health and happiness of a child whose circumstances are desperate.
FictionSuspenseDomestic Suspense

Surviving the storm

Review by Arlene McKanic

Some readers will open Meg Little Reilly’s novel and come to certain conclusions about the starring couple. Ash and Pia are from gentrified Brooklyn, but when the book begins, they’ve fled to Vermont, Ash’s natal state, in an attempt to live more “naturally.” Since the book is narrated by Ash in hindsight, we learn he’s survived a storm that makes Superstorm Sandy look like a breezy day at the beach. At last, some may think, the yuppies get theirs.

The problem with this schadenfreude is that the nice, solid, longtime citizens of Isole, Vermont, also get theirs when this storm hits. Even before the apocalypse—and Reilly is masterful at keeping this meteorological monster offstage until the right time—the ties that bind this little community begin to unravel. Ash and Pia’s marriage begins to fracture under the sheer stress of waiting for something to happen.

Neither Ash nor Pia is particularly embraceable, but Reilly has created likable secondary characters: Peg, the nature-loving scientist neighbor; Crow, the hippie/survivalist/loner; Maggie, the doughty schoolteacher; and August, the half-wild boy whom Ash befriends. Suspense comes from wondering who will survive and what the world will look like once this storm has come and gone.

Though writers have long warned us about what happens when humans mess with nature in general and the weather in particular, We Are Unprepared might be in the vanguard of tales that deal with the consequences of human-caused climate change. As such, it is an admirable example of the genre.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Some readers will open Meg Little Reilly’s novel and come to certain conclusions about the starring couple. Ash and Pia are from gentrified Brooklyn, but when the book begins, they’ve fled to Vermont, Ash’s natal state, in an attempt to live more “naturally.” Since the book is narrated by Ash in hindsight, we learn he’s survived a storm that makes Superstorm Sandy look like a breezy day at the beach. At last, some may think, the yuppies get theirs.
FictionDebut Fiction

Generations of secrets to uncover in this chilling debut

Review by Arlene McKanic

There’s something not right about the Evans women, the protagonists of Heather Young’s troubling debut novel; her title The Lost Girls is apt.  

The book alternates between chapters narrated by the elderly Lucy Evans, and a semi-omniscient narrator whose focus is Justine, Lucy’s rootless and timid grandniece, who inherits her Minnesota home. The tale begins during the Depression, when Lucy, her sisters Lilith and Emily, and their parents conduct their annual retreat to this same house, then a vacation home by a lake. We know that something’s wrong with this bunch from the start, and as the summer wears on the wrongness curdles, then erupts into horror. 

Much of what’s wrong with the generations of Evans women begins with the men in—and out of—their lives. We start with the sisters’ dad, Thomas. They and their mother Eleanor are afraid of him. He is a bit authoritarian, but that trait seems mediated by a gentleness and keen intelligence. He even takes Lucy fishing one morning. They have a good time. What’s there to fear? Also, why is Eleanor so suffocatingly protective of 6-year-old Emily? Why are Lucy and Lilith, who share an intense bond, so mean to the little girl?         

Then there’s Justine, abandoned by her husband and left to raise their two daughters in San Diego. Terrified of loneliness, she takes up with then tries to leave Patrick, a man who can only be called a successful sociopath. We meet Justine’s ghastly and embittered mother, Maurie, who flitted from man to man like a bedraggled moth when Justine was a child and deprived her of anything like stability. Both Patrick and Maurie, daughter of Lilith, manage to track Justine down in Minnesota in the middle of winter. The results are what you’d expect.

Though a veteran of a few writing seminars and workshops, Young is a lawyer, one of a line who have become writers of fiction. What many of these attorney/writers share is a fondness for the detail that seems unimportant at first but then becomes crucial and bits of evidence that lead to an irrefutable conclusion. Young’s summation: the patriarchy hurts women and girls, but it hurts men and boys just as much. This might not be news, but in Young’s hands it feels startling and essential.

There’s something not right about the Evans women, the protagonists of Heather Young’s troubling debut novel; her title The Lost Girls is apt.  

FictionDebut Fiction

No miracles, but two lonely souls find a match

Review by Arlene McKanic

There are some writers who represent a world with such immediacy that it’s scary. You wonder what their experience was. Has he or she ever actually been there, or done that? This is the feeling you’ll get when you read Scott Stambach’s debut novel, The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko.

The book is the diary of a severely crippled Belorussian boy who’s spent his whole life in a hospital for sick children. Born in 1987, his deformities, and those of his fellow inmates, were no doubt caused by the radiation that resulted from the Chernobyl disaster. So the perfidy and carelessness of adults lies always in the story’s background, as well as in the foreground. Save the saintly and maternal Natalya, most of the nurses are indifferent or sadistic. The mostly unseen post-Soviet bureaucracy makes it clear it has little to spare for these damaged children, even if their damage was caused by another arm of the same bureaucracy.

Seventeen-year-old Ivan copes with this with his fierce intelligence, sarcasm and ability to make life a bit difficult for the staff, even as he lacks one arm, both legs and two fingers on his one hand. Reader, he can do some remarkable things with just two fingers and a thumb. 

Then, Polina arrives. At first, she looks like a normal teenaged girl, but she is probably another instance of Chernobyl’s collateral damage. She has leukemia, and it will kill her. But her blossoming relationship with Ivan gives them both reasons to thrive. Surely, they are a match for each other, for she’s as ornery as he is until the disease knocks the orneriness out of her. Clear your calendar for an afternoon of ugly-crying.

What’s amazing is nothing in Stambach’s C.V. would make a reader think he’d be capable of such a book. His bio says he’s a special ed teacher in a San Diego charter school who’s written for literary magazines. Is that it? How does he know what it’s like to be a boy with half a body, or a girl whose white blood cells and chemo drugs are in a pitched battle over who is going to kill her first? The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko must be counted as a miracle of a book.

There are some writers who represent a world with such immediacy that it’s scary. This is the feeling you’ll get when you read Scott Stambach’s debut novel, The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko.

FictionLiterary Fiction

A teen’s tortured, but fiery soul

Review by Arlene McKanic

The teenage narrator of Jesse Ball’s heartbreaking sixth novel, How to Set a Fire and Why, is Lucia, but as far as the world is concerned, she is nameless and worthless. When the story opens, we learn that she’s functionally orphaned. Her father is dead, her mother driven to such madness that she no longer recognizes her own child. Reduced to penury, Lucia lives with her elderly aunt Lucy in a converted garage whose rent they can’t afford. At one point, Lucia’s shoes are so run down that her toes poke through.

What she does have is her father’s old Zippo, and even this gets her into trouble when she attacks a boy at her school for daring to touch it. This gets her sent to another school, where she falls in with a loosely organized bunch of teenage pyromaniacs. The idea of burning things up and burning things down, to inflict hurt on a world that has inflicted hurt on her, captures Lucia’s imagination.

At times, the reader may not like Lucia very much. She lies, she cheats, she steals; her thoughts about her peers are uncharitable, to put it mildly; she smarts off to authority figures, often to her detriment. On the other hand, she’s devoted to her aunt and goes out of her way to visit her psychotic mother. Other adult authority figures rarely respect her, the kids in school despise her, her petty crimes come about because a lot of the time she doesn’t even have money to buy food. 

Maybe, this angry, sad but hopeful book suggests, having no name has its benefits, especially for kids who have nothing to lose. In an age of grotesque inequality, it’s something to consider.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The teenage narrator of Jesse Ball’s heartbreaking sixth novel, How to Set a Fire and Why, is Lucia, but as far as the world is concerned, she is nameless and worthless. When the story opens, we learn that she’s functionally orphaned. Her father is dead, her mother driven to such madness that she no longer recognizes her own child. Reduced to penury, Lucia lives with her elderly aunt Lucy in a converted garage whose rent they can’t afford. At one point, Lucia’s shoes are so run down that her toes poke through.
FictionPopular Fiction

A laugh-out-loud look at midlife

Review by Arlene McKanic

Early in Terry McMillan’s hilarious, sad, wry, raunchy novel—-aren’t all of her books thus?—the protagonist, 50-something Georgia Young, opens the door to a handsome 18-year-old pizza delivery boy. With memories of How Stella Got Her Groove Back swimming in her head, the reviewer immediately thought, ‘Oh Terry, don’t go there. Please don’t.’ I won’t reveal where McMillan goes with the hot pizza delivery boy, but the places she takes readers in I Almost Forgot About You are utterly fascinating.

Georgia is an optometrist living in the San Francisco Bay area. She’s comfortable financially: She has a big honking house and shops at Whole Foods without trauma. Her two daughters are grown; she’s a veteran of two divorces; and she’s bored rigid with her life. When a patient reveals that she’s the daughter of one of Georgia’s old flames, who is alas, no longer alive, Georgia gets the idea to contact all—well, a lot—of the men she had relationships with in her torrid past and let them know what they meant to her. A rollicking story ensues.

The reader finds herself torn between gritting her teeth at how right McMillan gets the relationships between best friends, ex-spouses, ex-lovers, parents and children and putting the book down to laugh out loud. What else can you do when Georgia describes an ex-husband’s perfidy making her want to turn her head around “like Linda Blair in The Exorcist”?

Head-spinning aside, what an amazing character Georgia Young is! She’s loving, though everyone she loves gets on her nerves. She’s wise and foolish, whip-smart and sort of dumb. Isn’t she a bit like you and me? She’s also supported by one of the best cast of characters McMillan has conjured up in a long time. Run, don’t walk, and pick up this exuberant summer read.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Early in Terry McMillan’s hilarious, sad, wry, raunchy novel—-aren’t all of her books thus?—the protagonist, 50-something Georgia Young, opens the door to a handsome 18-year-old pizza delivery boy. With memories of How Stella Got Her Groove Back swimming in her head, the reviewer immediately thought, ‘Oh Terry, don’t go there. Please don’t.’ I won’t reveal where McMillan goes with the hot pizza delivery boy, but the places she takes readers in I Almost Forgot About You are utterly fascinating.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A daughter’s trip back from the brink

Review by Arlene McKanic

In Dear Fang, With Love, the second novel from Rufi Thorpe, Lucas is given a singular opportunity to show kindness to the daughter he doesn’t know all that well, even though she’s 17. He and his ex-girlfriend, Katya, had Vera when they were teenagers themselves. Lucas didn’t meet Vera until she was 5 and has been in and out of her life ever since. It is only when the mind of this beautiful, strange and brilliant young woman finally breaks that he steps into the gap, as it were. His solution is to take her to Lithuania, the home of their ancestors, including one who escaped the Nazis and Lithuania for a prosaic life in America.

Even though Vera doesn’t know much about her traumatized great-grandmother, the effect Lithuania has on her is dramatic. Thorpe’s depiction of mental illness is painfully accurate. She shows how Vera’s intelligence and imagination are tangled up with her mental issues, through both her ramblings on her laptop and her increasingly desperate and delusional emails to Fang, the boyfriend she left behind in California. Thorpe also understands the utter helplessness felt by a sick person’s loved ones. Lucas, who doesn’t even know how to parent a teenager who’s psychologically normal—are any teenagers psychologically normal?—is out of his league with Vera. 

But Lucas is a kind if flawed man, and he uses that kindness to lead his unhappy daughter from the brink. In one astonishing, terrifying scene, he does so literally. This is what a parent does, says Thorpe’s wise and sad book.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In Dear Fang, With Love, the second novel from Rufi Thorpe, Lucas is given a singular opportunity to show kindness to the daughter he doesn’t know all that well, even though she’s 17. He and his ex-girlfriend, Katya, had Vera when they were teenagers themselves. Lucas didn’t meet Vera until she was 5 and has been in and out of her life ever since. It is only when the mind of this beautiful, strange and brilliant young woman finally breaks that he steps into the gap, as it were. His solution is to take her to Lithuania, the home of their ancestors, including one who escaped the Nazis and Lithuania for a prosaic life in America.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Far from Cartagena, the culture follows

Review by Arlene McKanic

Not even a quarter of the way through Patricia Engel’s The Veins of the Ocean, readers will realize they’re getting sort of angry. Narrated by Reina, a young woman who emigrated with her family from Cartagena, Colombia to Miami, these pages are a compendium of the lousy ways men can treat women and the reasons women put up with it. Babies are tossed from bridges because men think their women are cheating on them. Reina’s parents got married because her father raped her mother and her mother wanted to avoid scandal. Reina allows all manner of men to paw at her. She is utterly devoted to her incarcerated brother despite his lack of remorse as a child murderer. Does he return such devotion? Not a chance.

Reina is resigned to all this; she expects nothing of men when it comes to commitment, responsibility or even respect. But then she meets Nesto.

Nesto is not like any man Reina has ever met. An orisha-worshipping Cuban émigré, he is genuinely interested in how she thinks and feels. He longs for the children he left back in Cuba—and he even had them with the same woman, to whom he was once married. Very few things have worked out in Reina’s life. Can she take a chance on this gentle, handsome, enigmatic man?

Reina and Nesto’s story is enhanced by Engel’s sensuous writing. The reader can see the different shades of blue of the ocean, the greens of palms and sea grapes, the smells of the semi-tropics. But Engel’s compassion for her people, the poverty-stricken Hispanic immigrants and refugees who’ve jumped from the fire of their native countries into the frying pan of the United States, is boundless. She even makes you understand why the men around Reina do what they do, even if she doesn’t absolve them. The Veins of the Ocean reminds us of the importance of love, respect, family and forgiveness.

Not even a quarter of the way through Patricia Engel’s The Veins of the Ocean, readers will realize they’re getting sort of angry. Narrated by Reina, a young woman who emigrated with her family from Cartagena, Colombia to Miami, these pages are a compendium of the lousy ways men can treat women and the reasons women put up with it.
FictionDebut Fiction

An old-fashioned man in the modern age

Review by Arlene McKanic

How well can you know a person, even a person you’ve loved and lived with for decades? This is the question posed by Phaedra Patrick’s gentle, funny and wistful first novel, The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper.

The curious charms mentioned in the title are not attributes of Arthur Pepper, a rather ordinary pensioner from Yorkshire. They are actual charms found on a bracelet that belonged to his late wife, Miriam. Arthur’s investigations show them to be mementos of specific times, people and places in her life. It seems that the outwardly contented wife and mother that Arthur knew was a very different person before they met and married.

As Arthur uncovers Miriam’s past, the charms of Arthur himself become more evident. Amazingly old-fashioned, he seems not to have come of age in the 1960s but the 1950s or earlier; this made the reviewer think, "Come on, this chap is younger than Mick Jagger." But this is part of the book’s sweetness. 

A virgin when he married, Arthur has never been with another woman; even chastely kissing an old friend of Miriam’s makes him feel vaguely adulterous. He dutifully waters his fern, whom he has named Frederica. He treats even the weirdest people he meets on his quest with kindness and frets that his stodginess squashed something adventurous in his wife. Arthur’s charms, in this charmless age, are curious indeed.

Charming, too, is Patrick’s straightforward and unadorned style. Because of this, when Arthur’s grief overwhelms him like the tiger who almost eats him at one point—you have to read the book—it pierces the heart. You root for him every step of the way.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

How well can you know a person, even a person you’ve loved and lived with for decades? This is the question posed by Phaedra Patrick’s gentle, funny and wistful first novel, The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper.
FictionDebut Fiction

A year inside a creative haven

Review by Arlene McKanic

For folks who were there, the New City York of 1980 was the best of times and the worst of times. The city was a cauldron of energy, creativity and wonderful freakishness. It was the city of Basquiat and Keith Haring’s hit-and-run works of art—and even a place where rents were cheap if you lived in Greenwich Village or Alphabet City. AIDS had not yet ravaged the city like a daikaiju from outer space. It was a place where a girl from Ketchum, Idaho, or an orphan from Argentina could come and dream big, make it big and yes, fail big.

Molly Prentiss’ Tuesday Nights in 1980 follows several linked characters during the year in question. There’s Lucy, the innocent girl from Ketchum and her lover, Engales, the ambitious painter from Argentina, who has escaped that country’s encroaching fascism as well as a quasi-incestuous relationship with his sister. James is an art critic noted for incorporating his synesthesia into his reviews. To him art, people and things are jumbles of vibrant sensations and colors. He is drawn to Lucy because she’s as fluorescent yellow as a squash blossom. Engales, who he meets after the artist suffers a disfiguring accident, fascinates him with his blueness. James’ wife, Marge, is red.

Because James knows all these people with varying degrees of intense intimacy, everything in the book will get very, very complicated. How can it not? It was 1980.

The book is such an accomplished and surefooted work that it’s amazing to learn that it’s a debut. Prentiss’ descriptions of New York and its fractious art scene will make those who were there almost nostalgic, and her deep empathy for her characters, messed up as some of them are, is moving. She pulls off the difficult feat of making dialogue sound like conversations overheard in the next room. Tuesday Nights in 1980 is a discerning, passionate and humane work.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

For folks who were there, the New City York of 1980 was the best of times and the worst of times. The city was a cauldron of energy, creativity and wonderful freakishness. It was the city of Basquiat and Keith Haring’s hit-and-run works of art—and even a place where rents were cheap if you lived in Greenwich Village or Alphabet City. AIDS had not yet ravaged the city like a daikaiju from outer space. It was a place where a girl from Ketchum, Idaho, or an orphan from Argentina could come and dream big, make it big and yes, fail big.
FictionPopular Fiction

An old-fashioned heroine takes on NYC

Review by Arlene McKanic

A reader of fashion writer and editor William Norwich’s latest novel, My Mrs. Brown, could be forgiven for thinking its titular heroine is living in the 1950s, like Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge. The lady described is in late middle age. Mrs. Brown is modest, fair-minded and dutiful, and lives in a quiet Rhode Island town. The highlight of her year is being asked to help with an inventory of the estate of a philanthropic widow. Only then does it becomes clear that the story takes place in the present day. Are there still people like this?

Norwich’s answer is an enthusiastic “Yes!” There are ladies who wear twinsets and sensible shoes, bake morning glory muffins and still write letters in the age of Facebook and endless texting. You’ll be surprised how shocked you are when you encounter the first F-bomb in this book. No, it does not come from Mrs. Brown.

During the inventory, Mrs. Brown sorts through Mrs. Groton’s sumptuous dresses, and she finds one whose twin she simply must have. She’s a good seamstress but she could never sew such a glorious garment. No, Mrs. Brown has to go to New York to find such a dress, and the prospect fills her with the terror and excitement of a recruit waiting to storm a beachhead.

Even if you find Mrs. Brown anachronistic, with the gentle conservatism of an age long-gone, you come to like and respect her. Then, you come to love her. For along with her belief in decency and humility comes tenacity. She is determined to overcome her fear of New York—its crazy transit system and good/bad smells and confusing street signs and all the rich and sophisticated people who still manage to be kind when they meet her—because she must have that Oscar de la Renta dress, which she has painstakingly saved for. She does not want the dress to entice a man, or to flatter her figure or even because she thinks she’s as good as Mrs. Groton, although she is. The reviewer will leave it to the reader to find out the reason why.

Goodness really is its own reward, says Norwich’s gentle-hearted book. Better yet, sometimes goodness is rewarded.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A reader of fashion writer and editor William Norwich’s latest novel, My Mrs. Brown, could be forgiven for thinking its titular heroine is living in the 1950s, like Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge. The lady described is in late middle age. Mrs. Brown is modest, fair-minded and dutiful, and lives in a quiet Rhode Island town. The highlight of her year is being asked to help with an inventory of the estate of a philanthropic widow. Only then does it becomes clear that the story takes place in the present day. Are there still people like this?
Fiction

The tide of time

Review by Arlene McKanic

Elizabeth Poliner, author of Mutual Life & Casualty, gets the central tragedy of her latest novel out of the way on page one: the beloved youngest child in a close-knit Jewish family dies. The action revolves around the before, during and after of this catastrophe, in the summer of 1948.

The story is narrated by Molly, the daughter of one of the three sisters who jointly own the Connecticut beach house they and their kids flee to in the summers. The rest of the family includes Molly’s charming and aggravating older brother, Howard; their bookish cousin, Nina; their aunts, Vivie and Bec; father Mort and uncles Leo and Nelson. All of their lives take unexpected detours after the death of Davy. Yet the detours aren’t terrible; the family may have been changed by tragedy, but they weren’t destroyed by it.

Poliner’s characters are memorable. There’s Molly’s mother, Ada, in all her bigoted, extravagantly loving prickliness. Molly’s father, Mort, takes his roles as husband, father, businessman and Jew with supreme seriousness; when Howard fails to show up one morning for the weekly minyan, Mort can’t let it go. Uncle Nelson, overweight and unlucky in love, keeps stashes of Tootsie rolls in his pockets and pops them at moments of high tension, even at the Shabbos meal. Vivie, Nina’s mother, is still a little sore from Ada having stolen Mort away when they were girls. Her husband, Leo, is neurasthenic. Bec is the most independent; she knows her affair with a married Catholic man will almost certainly make her an outcast. The Syrkins are as close as breathing indeed, and Bec sometimes needs to take long walks just to breathe some fresh air. Yet she always returns.

Since everyone in the novel is good, if not always nice, it’s tempting to think of As Close to Us as Breathing as lacking a villain. This isn’t quite true; the villain is inattention. Inattention by her husband and the world in general has left Ada melodramatic and bitter and her sisters frustrated. A mere moment of inattention leads to Davy’s death. The book is Molly’s attempt, finally, to give her ordinary, grief-stricken family the attention they deserve.

Elizabeth Poliner, author of Mutual Life & Casualty, gets the central tragedy of her latest novel out of the way on page one: the beloved youngest child in a close-knit Jewish family dies. The action revolves around the before, during and after of this catastrophe, in the summer of 1948.

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