Novel reveals scenes from a broken marriage
After 14 years of marriage, my wife’s sense of humour still surprises me. Her jokes are impeccably timed, razorsharp, and mainly at my expense. They’re so good, in fact, I usually write them down as soon as she says them. None of this, however, keeps me from wondering: when did she get so funny?
Marriage thrives on long stretches of forgetfulness and short bursts of revelation. Every so often you see the person you thought you knew so well in a new light. Except nothing is new — it just suddenly feels that way.
And that feeling is what counts. It’s also what’s missing from the marriage of Edie and Richard Middlestein in Jami Attenberg’s new novel, The Middlesteins. As the story begins, Richard has left his wife of nearly 40 years because he can no longer overlook the fact that she’s deliberately eating herself to death. Her lifelong love of food — Edie’s weight gain is included in the title of each of her chapters — has become a life-threatening addiction.
For her part, Edie can’t let go of more trivial but no less irritating episodes like the “terrible trip” she and Richard took to Rome. A long overdue vacation, it was intended to be “a fresh start for the two of them after the kids were out of the house.” Instead, as Edie recounts to her grown-up daughter Robin, Richard complained the whole time about having brought the wrong shoes.
Robin is sympathetic — she’s not unfamiliar with her father’s neediness — but she also wonders why they didn’t just buy new shoes. But, as her mother explains, she’s missing the point, namely: “Did I have to do everything for him?”
Attenberg, a 41-year-old Brooklyn-based author with a story collection and two other novels to her credit, is clearly attracted to the absurdity inherent in middle-class, middle-American family life. If anything, the novel’s title is a little too onthe-nose, the same often applies to the humour in The Middlesteins. Edie’s affair with the owner of a Chinese restaurant is sweet and funny, but not especially original. I couldn’t help thinking of as the setup to an old joke about Jews and their affection for Chinese food.
Still, by the end of the novel, Attenberg has done a commendable job of highlighting the predicament faced by characters compelled to love each other even as they are forced to acknowledge that they might not like each other. The Middlesteins is funny at the start, distressing at the finish and, in between, it explores the limits not only of love, but of gratitude, of what we owe each other, and the consequences of turning our back on that debt.
THE MIDDLESTEINS
By Jami Attenberg Grand Central Publishing
273 pages, $27.99