Musings on home, life and a family curse
Make Your Home Among Strangers
Jennine Capó Crucet
St. Martin’s: 400 pp., $26.99
In her debut novel, Jennine Capó Crucet writes of Lizet Ramirez, a first-generation Cuban American from Hialeah, Fla., struggling to survive her freshman year at a prestigious private university. College is a rare ticket out of Lizet’s rough neighborhood, but rising to meet its challenges forces her to abandon parts of a bold personality she honed at home. Her friends and family disapprove of these changes; the more she adapts, the louder they protest.
Lizet doesn’t fit in at school, either. There she encounters wellmeaning professors and students determined to define her based on their own ideas of minority students. Grateful for their help in an accidental plagiarism debacle, Lizet still can’t help but feel stigmatized by her old neighborhood. Eventually, she stops calling home; it’s too difficult to explain her struggles in the college world to her parents, and she is losing her connection to their lives.
Crucet’s strength lies in revealing Lizet’s inner dialogue. Once she stops calling home, Lizet says of her parents, “We never admitted that we’d needed to believe them when they told us nothing was wrong.” An Elián González-inspired subplot underscores Lizet’s struggle, while her efforts to navigate a world of mostly white privilege are told with self-deprecating humor and an understanding of the awkward conversations many students must have in their first years in college.
A Reunion of Ghosts
Judith Claire Mitchell
Harper: 400 pp., $26.99
Judith Claire Mitchell’s “A Reunion of Ghosts” is a darkly comic, multigenerational meditation on a family curse.
Lady, Vee and Delph Alter are middle-aged sisters, roommates and descendants of the German Jewish chemist (a fictionalized Fritz Haber) who discovered mechanisms to create synthetic fertilizer, weaponized chlorine gas and Zyklon.
The sisters’ family shame has bred a legacy of suicide, and the novel is conceived as both their memoir and group suicide note, a tome that details a doomed family cursed through a fourth generation for its patriarch’s sins.
Despite its heavy subject matter, “Reunion” is peppered with the sisters’ wit. “Q: How do three sisters write a single suicide note? A: The same way a porcupine makes love: carefully.” Lady, Vee and Delph spin tales of their doomed ancestry, lament their lost loves, illnesses and strange upbringing, and place themselves in poorly conceived situations that mostly spin out of control. Mitchell’s prose flows easily from pre-World War II Germany to Y2K New York.
“A Reunion of Ghosts” balances
The Body Where I Was Born
Guadalupe Nettel, translated from the Spanish by J.T. Lichtenstein
Seven Stories: 208 pp., $22.95
In Mexican writer Guadalupe Nettel’s autobiographical novel “The Body Where I Was Born,” a woman recalls her unconventional childhood through a series of stories about her life told to a silent listener, Dr. Sazlsvski.
Born with a birthmark on her cornea, the narrator has to wear a patch over her eye as a girl and doesn’t see well. She has a controlling grandmother and a wellmeaning but selfish mother, who nicknames her “cucaracha” — cockroach — for her habit of curling into herself. Abandoned first by her father, second by her mother and then by a mysterious friend who dies in a fire, the narrator begins to identify as an insect herself. In hallucinations and encounters connected to bugs, she defines her own existence as both a survivor and a human grotesque.
“The Body” follows the girl through her parents’ open marriage and divorce; through her life in Mexico City and then Aix-en-Provence, France; through her various friendships and encounters with people who do not see her or try to know her well. Hers is a story of isolation, often self-imposed; unable to understand the world around her, she buries herself in books.
The present-tense version of Nettel’s narrator is never developed; “The Body” is told as a series of disconnected stories from the narrator’s past. Is this deliberate obfuscation of the present central to the narrator’s idea of how she defines her adult self? If so, a piece is missing that would orient the reader. Nettel hints that she wants to blur what is real. “Perhaps when I finally finish [telling my story],” the narrator says, “for my parents and brother this book will be nothing but a string of lies. I take comfort in thinking that objectivity is always subjective.”