Starred review from July 22, 2019
A patriarch’s death strains a family’s already fraught relationships in this dazzling novel from Attenberg (All Grown Up). Shady real estate developer Victor Tuchman suffers a heart attack in New Orleans and is rushed to the hospital. During his final, lingering day, his family mentally rehashes key moments of his life in hopes of understanding the man they are losing. His wife, Barbra, still annoyed about leaving their Connecticut mansion, occupies herself with obsessive walking while remembering Victor’s quick transition from shy suitor to abusive tyrant. His daughter, Alex, flies in from Chicago, desperate to know the truth about Victor’s criminal past, and begrudges her mother’s insistence she let it go and make peace. Victor’s son Gary, who is in Los Angeles to jump-start his career in the movies, avoids answering calls from the family and intentionally misses his flight. Gary’s wife, Twyla, slips into a nervous breakdown during a cosmetic shopping spree, slowly revealing the true root of her distress. As Victor fades, the family’s dysfunction comes to light and they make drastic choices about their future. Attenberg excels at revealing rich interior lives—not only for her main cast, but also for cameo characters—in direct, lucid prose. This is a delectable family saga.
After the brutish family patriarch has a heart attack, the surviving Tuchmans (mostly) gather at his deathbed, each of them struggling to make sense of their past--and come to terms with their present. "He was an angry man, and he was an ugly man," the novel begins, "and he was tall, and he was pacing," and this is how we meet Victor Tuchman in the moments before he collapses. And so the family begins to assemble: Alex, his daughter, a newly divorced lawyer, arrives in New Orleans from the Chicago suburbs; his long-suffering wife, Barbra, tiny and stoic, is already there. His son, Gary, is very notably absent, but Gary's wife, Twyla--a family outlier, Southern and blonde--is in attendance, with her own family secrets. The novel takes place in one very long day but encompasses the entirety of lifetimes: Barbra's life before marrying Victor and the life they led after; Alex's unhappy Connecticut childhood and the growing gulf between her and her criminal father--irreconcilable, even in death. It encompasses Gary's earnest attempt to build a stable family life, to escape his family through Twyla, and Twyla's own search for meaning. Even the background characters have stories: the EMS worker who wants to move in with his girlfriend who doesn't love him; the CVS cashier leaving for school in Atlanta next year. The Tuchmans won't learn those stories, though, just as they won't learn each other's, even the shared ones. Victor is the force that brings them together but also the rift that divides them. Alex wants the truth about her father, and Barbra won't tell her; Gary wants the truth about his disintegrating marriage, and Twyla can't explain. Prickly and unsentimental, but never quite hopeless, Attenberg (All Grown Up, 2017, etc.), poet laureate of difficult families, captures the relentlessly lonely beauty of being alive. Not a gentle novel but a deeply tender one.
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Starred review from October 1, 2019
Victor Tuchman is the family patriarch in this whirling dervish of a novel. The story unfolds on the day he has a fatal heart attack. Victor was a criminal in his business life and a tyrant in his personal life. His wife Barbra, pacing the hospital halls, is counting her steps and recounting their dysfunctional life together. Daughter Alex, an attorney in Chicago, flies to New Orleans, not for a final goodbye but to cajole her mother into spilling the beans about her father's criminality. Gary, Victor's son, is in Los Angeles and deliberately misses his flight, unwilling to say goodbye, --which is understandable, as he rehashes his life with the abusive man lying in the hospital bed. Gary's wife, Twyla, does visit, her mind wandering through her Southern upbringing and a disastrous, shocking affair. Attenberg (All Grown Up) is a master of subtlety as she divulges everyone's thoughts, including the one-off characters such as the clerk at a CVS and the coroner. The unusual twist here is that readers learn all their stories while the characters do not. VERDICT Contemporary family sagas don't get much better than this novel, which should appeal to fans of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections or Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach. [See Prepub Alert, 3/25/19.]--Stacy Alesi, Eugene M. & Christine E. Lynn Lib., Lynn Univ., Boca Raton, FL
Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from September 1, 2019
Adult siblings Alex and Gary respond to their father's impending death with opposing tacks. Alex hops the next plane to New Orleans, where Gary and their parents, Victor and Barbra, live; Gary. meanwhile, is in Los Angeles and can't seem to get himself to leave. His wife, Twyla, joins Alex and Barbra at Victor's bedside in his absence. Barbra wants Alex to make peace with her unconscious father, but Alex is dying to know something even more private: why Barbra, an unequivocally cool customer, has stayed with tyrannical Victor all these years. Information! She wanted nothing more than that. Attenberg's (The Middlesteins, 2012; All Grown Up, 2017) seventh work of fiction is experienced mostly through Alex, Barbra, and Twyla, each one a terrifically nuanced character that's nearly impenetrable to the others yet intoxicatingly available to readers. As the story unfolds largely over a single day, memories are purged and bombshells dropped, not to mention the ever-curious matter of the vexing central character rendered mute for the duration. Attenberg writes with a deeply human understanding of her characters, and the fact that, when it comes to family, things are rarely well enough to leave alone.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)