Empathy leavens ‘ All This’ discord

“Their lives had become a disgrace.” And how.

There is much trauma and regret to sift through in “All This Could Be Yours” ( Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 304 pp.,

★★★★), a novel of one damaged family’s reckoning, though author Jami Attenberg’s wordplay, wit and dark humor makes that a more pleasurable experience than most could manage.

Attenberg (“All Grown Up,” “The Middlesteins”) is also a masterful psychoanalyst, crafting characters whose mental and emotional journeys surprise even as they make perfect intuitive sense. She doesn’t flinch from digging into life’s messiness, pressing gently but resolutely into wounds to see what oozes out. There’s big stuff, like acrimonious divorce, trust- shattering affairs, sexual and psychological abuse. But it’s the small stuff – insecurity, lost youth, everyday loneliness – that quietly devastates.

Attenberg’s medium, as much as the written word, is familial dysfunction. And the Tuchman family is a matryoshka stacking doll of dysfunction. The layers of rot start to be revealed when patriarch Victor is hospitalized by a heart attack. For many families, an impending death might be a catalyst for reckoning and reconciliation.

But for the Tuchmans, all roads lead to more dysfunction.

Viktor was a violent man, profligate in his brutality, a criminal real estate magnate with seemingly little love for

anything but power. While he mostly reserved the physical abuse for his wife, Barbra, his violence still distorts his children, daughter Alex and son Gary, now grown, seeping through the cracks in the barriers they’ve erected around their lives.

Alex is still grappling with the fallout of her divorce, missing her only daughter, who’s with her dad for the summer, when Barbra calls.

“She had given up on her parents years ago,” Attenberg writes of Alex.

“Things would never be honest between them. So why bother with any relationship at all?” But Alex takes the call anyway, and she makes the trip to her father’s deathbed in sweltering New Orleans. “Now, things could be different.” She’s determined to get answers, thinking the truth – of her father’s criminal enterprise, of her parents’ inexplicable and enduring marriage – will set her free.

Gary, though, steadfastly refuses to engage. He’s out in California, ostensibly for work, though something seems to be amiss with his marriage, too. His wife, Twyla, a charming Southern beauty and seemingly devoted wife and mother, flutters around the dying Victor,

Bible in hand. Victor and Barbra aren’t the only ones safeguarding family secrets.

“All This Could Be Yours” is an emotionally messy novel, but precise in craft. The narrative voice is complex and profound, jumping from head to head, consciousness to consciousness, inhabiting main characters and peripheral figures alike. Attenberg writes with care about even the most glancing characters – a random streetcar driver, a Pilates instructor on a hike, a stroke victim sharing Victor’s hospital ward – her narrative touching so many souls, it’s like a spirit passing through.

Alex wants answers, but even when she gets them, she doesn’t really, and neither do we. Despite direct access to people’s innermost thoughts, their hearts remain shrouded, a little piece of them forever unknowable. In the end, we’re little closer to understanding why Victor was the way he was, why Barbra loved him or why such abuse was allowed to perpetuate.

“She didn’t want to explain who she was to anyone,” Attenberg writes of Barbra. “She would prefer to remain a beautiful mystery, her soul lingering forever in a shimmering haze. Her truth was for no one but herself.”

Even in the absence of that understanding, we are left more inclined toward empathy. What higher praise for good fiction?