Author: Jennifer Graham

(Harper, 224 pages)

When my son was little and found it hard to sit through movies, he once announced in the middle of a showing, “If they don’t start blowing stuff up soon, I’m outta here.”

Even as an adult, he wouldn’t make it halfway through a Catherine Newman novel.

Newman’s success comes not from explosive plots but from the memorable characters she develops and the dialogue she crafts that makes the experience of reading her books not like reading a book but like eavesdropping on your neighbors or the people at the next table at a diner. In Wreck she returns to the family she introduced in 2024’s Sandwich, which was a nod to both the Cape Cod town and to challenges of people caring for both children and parents.

Two years older, 50-something parents Nick and Rachel (who goes by Rocky) are still looking for that empty nest. Son Jamie is married and working as a consultant in New York, and daughter Willa has a university job that involves caring for fruit flies in a lab, but Rocky’s father has moved in with the family after the death of his wife. While prone to missing a beat in a conversation, Grandpa is otherwise in good shape, and things are going well for the family in general.
But then, as Newman writes in a memorable opening in which an horned owl looks down from its perch as a car and a train are about to collide, “a great screeching has begun.”

The young man who dies in the accident, Miles Zapf, was a local; the family knew him, but only casually. But there is an unexpected connection that gradually becomes clever as the investigation continues and Rocky and Willa become increasingly obsessed with the case, and Rocky starts paying attention to Miles’s mother’s posts on social media.

Meanwhile, Rocky has a strange rash that is spreading all over her body, sending her from one perplexed doctor to another and finally into Boston for a spiral CT scan, and into the rabbit hole of the internet, where every ailment is just one click away from being seen as a malignancy.

Again, there is nothing in the way of a hang-on-to-your-seats plot to find here, just a slow unraveling of normalcy, the loss of which no one notices until it’s gone. Newman herself told an interviewer she struggled to find an elevator pitch for the book, “because nothing really happens,” which isn’t exactly true, but the events do unfold, shall we say, languidly. At times, Newman seems reluctant to even let her characters finish a meal, because they are all enjoying being together so much. (More than one chapter is just the family having breakfast and talking.)

And yet how can you not love a writer who uses Godzilla as a verb? As in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, there are surprises around every corner, surprises in packages of words.

Readers will recognize people in their own lives in Newman’s characters, who are rich in human foibles while deeply empathetic. Rocky’s late mother, for example, appears in one memory in which she is reporting on the health of someone she barely knows. Trying to figure out why, Rocky muses that her mother must have been trying to connect with her, maybe about their own frailty or mortality. “I don’t know why all our tender feelings have to masquerade as news,” she thinks.

In one of my favorite scenes — which takes place at yet another family meal — Rocky mulls over how validated she feels when her adult children take up one of her habits. It feels like a vote of confidence, she thinks, when a child later comes to buy the same kind of olive oil, for example, that you do.

But then she recounts the day that Jamie suddenly announced to his parents, “It turns out, I really like lamb.”

“The utterance was a little more heated than one might expect. ‘You guys have always been like, We don’t like lamb. Like, as a family. We are a people who don’t like lamb!’”

The ensuing conversation is both comical and full of the best kind of family drama, the kind that will one day result in a story, not lingering bitterness.

Combining humor and poignancy can be hard to pull off, but Newman is a master. In the matter of her health, Rocky says, “I’m the kind of kale-eating person who nonetheless has a massive stable of doctors, everybody whinnying and rearing up on their hind legs and neighing out their copay requests.” It is in writing about Rocky’s journey through the health care system that Newman’s gifts shine through, pointing out the frustrations that a patient can have with the system while at the same time being grateful for the technology and the professionals who see us through illness. And, of course, the bewilderment of a once-healthy person suddenly thrust into this strange world:

“One minute, you’re with all the healthy people on the beach, everyone enjoying the sunshine and salt spray, maybe tossing a Frisbee around. And then suddenly you’re alone in the waves, getting yanked out to sea by some medical undertow, the shore receding from view while all the healthy people wave to you pityingly.”

Newman writes about pill organizers and stool samples, and teaching hospitals and patient portals, while making wry observations about the sort of stuff offered on Buy Nothing websites and the aching love a mother has for her children, which subsides not in the least when they move out. In other words, she writes about real life. It is, Rocky says, kind of like the game Chutes and Ladders: “The constant ascending and descending — every good and bad thing seeming, in moments, so random and temporary.” In Wreck, Newman gives us a diversion from our own, reassurance that we are all in this together, and there are laughs to be had even when things don’t turn out the way we hope. Readers will hope they’ve not seen the last of Nick and Rocky. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Newman will read from Wreck at The Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough beginning at 6 p.m., Friday, Nov. 21.

Featured Photo: Wreck, by Catherine Newman (Harper, 224 pages)

(Harper, 305 pages)

When Alfie Logan is 8 years old he learns that he has the supernatural ability to undo the past. By whispering the word “twice,” he can transport himself to any previous moment of time and relive his life from that moment, correcting any mistakes he previously made.

That’s a power that would come in handy, for sure, but it’s one that is also fraught with danger, as we learned from the Back to the Future franchise. But in Mitch Albom’s new novel Twice, this isn’t the world-altering time travel of Dr. Who or Marty McFly. Albom puts the power into a child who is about to lose his mother, but with caveats: Alfie can’t go back to the same moment twice, and he can’t keep anyone from dying when it’s their time.

Albom is the Detroit columnist who parlayed his bestselling memoir Tuesdays With Morrie into a side career of writing heartwarming books. This one, the reader has reason to suspect, will be no different, even though it begins with a jailhouse interrogation of the grown-up Alfie, arrested for suspected gambling fraud and apparently suffering from some terminal illness that will soon end his life. How did someone blessed with the ability to undo mistakes wind up in these circumstances? And what happened to make Alfie estranged from the love of his life, Gianna Rule, a woman Alfie wired $2 million to after winning three straight games of roulette at a Bahamas casino?

These are the questions that Albom bets will sustain readers through a story that requires a monumental suspension of disbelief over its premise: that a superpower of “second chances” can be passed on through families, like a propensity for bunions or brown eyes. Incredibly, it works.

The narrative flips back and forth from the interrogation of Alfie by a cynical detective named LaPorta and what’s written in a black marbled composition notebook, the kind you buy at the Dollar Store. The notebook is titled “For the boss, to be read upon my death,” and it’s a journal of sorts in which Alfie explains the story of his remarkable life to an unidentified boss.

Unable to answer the detective’s questions without sounding like someone who is seriously mentally ill, Alfie offers him the notebook. It takes us back to Alfie’s childhood in Kenya, where his parents were missionaries and he befriended a captive elephant named Lallu and a girl about his own age named Princess. Then came his mother’s death, an event made even more traumatic because he had disobeyed his father’s instruction to stay with her, and his mother died alone. It was then that he discovered his gift, which allowed him to go back to the morning before his mother died — and not to prevent her death, but to at least be present with her, to be a comfort as she died.

The bereaved father and son soon move back to the United States, to Philadelphia, and Alfie begins playing with his gift. “A bad grade on a spelling test? I went back and aced it. A strikeout in a baseball game? I relived the at bat, this time knowing what pitches to expect. If I mouthed off and got punished, I repeated the encounter and kept my mouth shut the second time. Consequently, I rarely paid a price for bad behavior. And unlike most kids, I was never bruised or bloodied for more than a few seconds.”

If this sounds like it’s not a recipe for raising a responsible adult, well, yes, that’s a major plot hole. But because Alfie has a good heart and has suffered trauma, we know he’s a good guy and we are to pull for him, and there’s no way that he actually ripped off a casino, right? Also, as he pursues Gianna Rule as a young adult, even enrolling at Boston University in order to be near her, we accept that he is a good man and not actually a stalker. But as their off-and-on relationship unfolds, it’s increasingly complicated, especially when Alfie’s well-meaning rewinds undo one of their most significant interactions.

The journalist Katherine Lanpher has said that the three most beautiful words in the English language are “What happened next?” That question is the fuel that powers this story; Albom is a gifted and experienced storyteller who knows how to lure his readers to the last page. And the ending of this book does not disappoint. What ultimately happens is wholly unexpected, and the interlocking events that lead to that point fit together nicely, even though the suspension of disbelief is just as necessary on the last page as the first. But if you believe in magic, or want to believe, it totally works.

At one point Alfie writes in his notebook, “There are planks that we walk, and planks that we jump off,” and jumping off seems appropriate for Twice. The book sounds kind of strange, and it is kind of strange, but it’s a lovely feel-good book to kick off the holiday season. B

Featured Photo: Twice, by Mitch Albom

(Viking, 449 pages)

Wall Street wasn’t always glamorous. Until the early 1900s, “The practice of buying and selling stock was disdained by polite society as a grubby endeavor, the handiwork of gamblers and social benefits,” writes Andrew Ross Sorkin in his new nonfiction book 1929.

But in a couple of decades that had changed, to the point where brokerages dotted New York City streets like Starbucks cafes do today, thanks in part to Americans’ new, lenient attitudes toward credit.

It was an ominous setup to the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed. Most contemporary Americans know little about these events, says Sorkin, who has set out to change that and to convince us that there are alarming parallels today.

Sorkin is the business journalist and CNBC personality whose 2009 book Too Big to Fail chronicled the 2008 financial crisis and was made into an HBO movie. That book was the kind you call both exhaustive and exhausting, coming in at more than 600 pages. In comparison, 1929 is a mere 456, not including footnotes. It is, let’s be honest, a lot, and I didn’t have “refresh my knowledge of the Glass-Steagall Act” on my to-do list for 2025.

But Sorkin does his research and wants us (or the future writer of the film script) to know every detail of this story, largely written in narrative style, with the players’ dialogue, surroundings and daily life recreated from diaries, memos, oral histories and private letters — as well as court records, depositions and lawsuits.

The cast of characters is large: presidents and partners of major banks, assorted business leaders and politicians. Some of the major players are largely obscure today (apologies if you are a fan of Russell Cornell Leffingwell) but many are names we know well, if only by their business legacy: Walter Percy Chrysler, Charles M. Schwab and Louis-Joseph Chevrolet among them. There are also cameos by people such as Groucho Marx and Winston Churchill.

Sorkin opens his story with a prologue set just after the market closed 13 points down on Oct. 28, 1929. A 13-point drop is nothing today, but it was worrisome then, particularly after a turbulent week. We follow Charles Edwin Mitchell — a banker known to the press as “Sunshine Charlie” — back to his office after emergency meetings at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. At his office, he learns that in his absence, his colleagues at National City Bank had been purchasing shares trying to inflate the bank’s value despite the volatility. They’d purchased 71,000 shares, at a cost of about $32 million — a risky scheme that could take the bank out if the market continued to fall. Mitchell envisions people lining up at National Bank’s 58 branches: “A run on the country’s largest bank. There was nothing bankers feared more.”

To make matters worse, the market downturn was occurring on the heels of one of the most optimistic times in America. Ten years earlier, Sorkin explains, General Motors started letting Americans buy its cars on credit. Sears, Roebuck & Co. joined in, offering credit plans for appliances. And before long, Wall Street let people buy stock “on margin” — putting up a percentage of the stock’s value and paying the rest over time. “Borrowing became a habit, born along with optimism,” Sorkin writes. “… And individuals became spectacularly rich. The wealthiest in the nation amassed fortunes in excess of $100 million, which, in today’s dollars, would be nearly $2 billion.” For the first time, businessmen were becoming celebrities, like performers and athletes.

Sorkin then takes us back to February 1929 and leads us month-by-month through that fateful year, exploring the mindsets that kept most of the business leaders from seeing what now seems inevitable in hindsight. “Across the country, speculating in the stock market had become so widespread and profitable that it seemed almost as if everyone were leveraged, committed, and in on the action.”

One Philadelphia banker suggested that women should be prohibited from the market “as a way of keeping in check the public enthusiasm for speculation.”

“So many women had started investing that brokerages had installed specially designed lounges and galleries where they could watch the fluctuations of the market safe from the rowdiness of men buying and selling,” Sorkin writes.

When President Herbert Hoover was inaugurated, he told Americans, “In no nation are the fruits of accomplishment more secure … I have no fears for the future of our country.”

There were a few Cassandras, among them Roger Babson, an economist who started a college by his own name in Massachusetts. He had been predicting a market crash for two years. But the majority of New York bankers in their stately Upper East Side homes would not and could not see it, as they had too much riding on the market. Besides, the economy had been up and down over the past few decades — the country had, after all, recovered from the Panic of 1907 and other more recent volatility.

Sorkin recounts the clashes between Washington and Wall Street as the point of crisis neared. Hoover, becoming worried, was starting to listen to Babson, but the powerful bankers countered Babson’s warnings with relentless optimism. One banker, 10 days before the crash, sent the president an 18-page letter saying that the American future “appears brilliant” and that it would be folly for the president to interfere with the market with “corrective action.”

All too soon we arrive at the last week of October 1929 and see why Charles Mitchell was having such a meltdown in the prologue 200 pages ago. In the days to come, there will be those crowds lined up outside banks and brokerages (16 pages of photos and images of New York Times front pages are a nice addition), suicides (though not as many as have been reported) and eventually criminal charges against Mitchell. There would be “Hoovertowns” (homeless encampments named after the president), breadlines and periods when nearly a quarter of Americans were unemployed. This is a story, after all, that did not end in 1930, but affected many people throughout the next decade and resulted in changes that still govern banking today.

Could the crash have been avoided? Sorkin says yes, with caveats. He also believes Hoover deserves a better grade as president than history has given him. The lessons he offers to us are simple: “we need to remember how easily we forget,” he writes.

And also: “No matter how many warnings are issued or how many laws are written, people will find new ways to believe that the good times can last forever. They will dress up hope as certainty. And in that collective fever, humanity will again and again lose its head.” B

Featured Photo: 1929, by Andrew Ross Sorkin

(Flatiron, 159 pages)

It’s impossible to imagine the Back to the Future franchise without Michael J. Fox, whose portrayal of Marty McFly seems effortless, even preordained. Surely Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale wrote the script with Fox in mind.

But the blockbuster film, released in 1985, started production with another actor in that role — Eric Stoltz. In fact, filming had gone on for more than a month before the team came to a conclusion that seems obvious now — Michael J. Fox is Marty McFly. But for that to happen, not only would Stolz have to be let go, but Fox would have to work two full-time jobs, as he was under contract to play Alex P. Keaton in the popular sitcom Family Ties. In fact, there had been conversations early on about Fox taking the role, but his handlers wouldn’t even approach him about it, because they knew he couldn’t get out of Family Ties and thought it would be too much.

Once offered the part, though, Fox gladly took on the role, thrilled to be working for a team of luminaries capped by Steven Spielberg. He showed up for work two days later, wearing outfits that had been quickly assembled and his own Nike sneakers, which would turn out to be an iconic part of the film. That story, and how the film came to be, is told in Future Boy, Fox’s latest memoir, written with Nelle Fortenberry and released 40 years after the film.

Even if you haven’t seen the film in decades, it’s an engrossing story that reveals the ins and outs of Hollywood and shows how cinematic sausage gets made. (If you’re one of the 11 or 12 people who haven’t seen the film, here’s the short version: a California teen gets accidentally sent back in time in a modified DeLorean and winds up interacting with young versions of his parents, threatening his own future existence.)

What it also reveals is how jaw-droppingly talented Fox was, even at age 23. When he first filmed a scene with Lea Thompson, who played Marty’s teenage mother, he had met her only 10 minutes earlier, and he had to negotiate a working relationship with an actress who was unhappy about Stoltz being let go. Even so, within a few takes, Fox was already comfortable enough to make suggestions, even adding a joke for Thompson and a pratfall for himself in the scene where they meet in a bedroom. (A pratfall is a fall on your bottom, if you haven’t heard the term.) He writes, “I was used to these comedic rhythms, my body was not my temple — it was a resource to be ransacked and pillaged.” She warmed up to him in short order.

As naturally as the acting came to him, the schedule was grueling: He’d work eight or nine hours during the day being Alex Keaton at Paramount Studios and then be driven 45 minutes to his next job, being Marty McFly at Universal, where he would sometimes film until 1 or 2 in the morning. Food would be set out around midnight. He was living in his own time portal.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Future Boy also goes back and forth in time. Fox takes us back to 1972, when his family traveled from their home in Vancouver to Los Angeles and took a tour at Universal Studios. Seven years later, after some promising work in the theater and on TV in Canada, he returned there again, this time with his father, to sign with an agent at age 18. He had a few “starving artist” years before he landed the role on Family Ties and recalled collecting day-old cookies that had been thrown out in dumpsters behind bakeries while going on auditions that resulted in no work. “I got the s … kicked out of me as a fledgling Los Angeleno and nearly threw in the towel,” he writes. But once those days were gone, they were gone for good. Family Ties was a hit.

Despite Fox’s natural ability and his belief in the self-help mantra “Act as if,” he knew the stakes were high and he could fail at Back to the Future. He also knew how the rest of the cast and crew were being inconvenienced to accommodate his schedule. “I was either going to be the best thing or the worst thing that had happened to these people. There could be no middle road,” he writes. And a lot was being spent on this film. “A single night [filming] in the mall parking lot probably cost as much as a full episode of Family Ties.”

Talking to the team about their remembrances, he learns that they don’t believe anyone would do something like that today. One says, “It was a ballsy thing we did, and I was afraid there was going to be a mutiny because we had to reshoot five weeks, but they all stayed. I think it’s because they loved the project; they were fans of the material.”

Fox, who is now 64 and has been living with Parkinson’s disease since age 29, dishes respectfully on some of his co-stars throughout the year and shares anecdotes from the Family Ties days, like how he randomly added the initial “P.” to his character’s name. He also reveals that some people had not wanted him for that show; the network president said he was too short for the role and also said, “You’ll never see that kid’s face on a lunchbox.” Fox later gifted him one.

There would be much more to his career that is not detailed here, but Fox was smart to make this book a moment in time. It also has a perfect coda: what happens when Fox, after 40 years, reaches out to Eric Stoltz, the actor whose place he took in the movie. Incredibly, they’d never talked about it. Read this, then watch the movie again. Or vice versa. Either way, you’ll enjoy the experience. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Future Boy, by Michael J. Fox (Flatiron, 159 pages)

(Riverhead, 400 pages)

Elizabeth Gilbert is not known as a humor writer, but a few pages into her latest book I laughed out loud when she apologetically wrote that she hadn’t yet said much about herself. “How very typical of me, to have immediately put my focus upon the other,” she wrote.

What? Say again? This is the woman who made the confessional memoir a genre when Eat, Pray, Love detonated on the world nearly 20 years ago. That bombshell of a book, and its subsequent movie, and its subsequent sequel (2010’s Committed) made Gilbert so much money that, had she lived modestly and managed it prudently, she wouldn’t have to work again, ever. She could have just flitted around the world eating and praying.

But as Gilbert reveals in her latest memoir, All the Way to the River, she gave money away as fast as it came in. She paid off credit card bills, medical bills and student loans, paid for friends’ homes and vacations, invested in businesses and covered college tuition. She sent checks to women she heard were getting divorced. At one point during the financial crisis of 2008, she says, she literally walked down the street of a small town in New Jersey asking business owners if they needed any money.

Some people might call that extraordinary kindness. Gilbert calls it co-dependancy. It was a symptom, she says, of a larger problem that has ruled her life: “love and sex addiction.” And with that, we kind of know what we’re in for here.

All the Way to the River is a book-length confession, told through the unfolding relationship with the woman she calls the love of her life: a hairdresser/musician named Rayya who at first was an acquaintance, then a best friend and eventually a lover.

Rayya was also addicted to drugs. She had gotten clean, but then, a week after her 56th birthday, learned that she was dying of cancer. And in the course of her illness, she again spirals into addiction.

Rayya died in 2018, and Gilbert has said that she is just now telling this story because it took “years of therapy, grief, confusion, recovery and sobriety for me to even be able to understand all that happened between us and why.”

She sees her own compulsive behavior reflected in Rayya’s addiction and entwines their stories in a narrative that is alternately harrowing, mystical, strange, unhinged and deeply touching. Could a less gifted writer publish a book in which she describes herself as being a conduit for a dead woman to hold and kiss her dying daughter and find a world receptive to this story? Unclear.

But Gilbert sees herself as both a radiant soul and a painfully flawed human being, and this sort of mysticism infuses her life. (At one point, Rayya told her that the first time they met, when Gilbert came to her apartment for a haircut, she saw “a big circle of golden light around my head” and later wondered “Who has that much freaking sunshine? What’s that all about?”)

Anxiety and fear has always infused her life as well. Without specifically assigning blame, Gilbert says that her parents “made it clear to me growing up that I was expected to leave the house right after high school and never live there again.” She did so, but with a “lifelong quest to make other people into my home,” a strategy that didn’t work especially well. She bounced from relationship to relationship and estimates that between the ages of 20 and 48, she lived in about 20 different homes. She left men she describes as good and says she broke up marriages. She could bear neither intimacy nor living alone.

Then she fell into the rabbit hole of Rayya, the woman that Gilbert let move into a church that she had bought sight unseen off Craigslist, planning at first to make it her forever home and then to turn into a working sanctuary for artists. Gilbert was still married at the time, but over time, she was falling in love with Rayya as they spent more time together and their relationship deepened.

After Rayya’s cancer diagnosis in 2016, Gilbert writes, “I cried so hard, I fell out of time and space.” She ended her marriage and became Rayya’s lover when they thought Rayya had six months to live. It turned out she had more time than that, and it wasn’t a Taylor Swiftian love story, but a dark, chaotic tunnel in which Rayya’s treatment depleted both women. At one point, Gilbert confesses, she considered killing Rayya with an overdose, and while she didn’t do that, she did finally ask her to move out of church.

When Rayya leaves and gets sober through the help of another friend, Gilbert is distraught and angry that someone else was able to help Rayya when she couldn’t. Theirs is a messy and complicated relationship, right to the end, except there really isn’t an end, because Gilbert believes that Rayya continued to communicate with her after her death.

As in Eat Pray Love, which proceeds from a middle-of-the-night instruction delivered from God, Gilbert has a running conversation with the divine, which is likely not the same kind of divinity perceived by her readers, especially those, say, in the deep South. The God that speaks to Gilbert throughout is one who addresses her as “my love” and “my child,” a love language that disbelieving cynics might call “wackadoodle.” And to be sure, there are scenes throughout that might also be described as cringe. But Gilbert answers her critics with her talent — she is, first and foremost, a creative force of nature expressed through a keyboard — and with her unwavering belief in the spiritual realm.

All the Way to the River is a memoir about addiction and love, but it is also a memoir about death — what it costs the living to watch someone close to us die, how it changes us. It’s a strange and often unsettling book that upends the myth of Elizabeth Gilbert given to us by Eat, Pray, Love.

It is a reminder that even in the genre of memoir, not everything is revealed, although it’s hard to see what Gilbert could have possibly left out here. Yes, we are entertained, touched, riveted. But there is an underlying ickiness to it, the sense we’ve been enlisted as voyeurs to another’s pain without their consent. But Gilbert has an answer for that: Rayya, she says, told her to write this book, told her after her death. “Tell them every single thing that happened! Don’t worry about protecting my dignity or yours — just go full punk rock with it. Lay it all out there.” Rayya assures Gilbert that she doesn’t mind being dead. “But I do miss grilling.” A

Featured Photo: All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert

(Simon & Schuster, 288 pages)

There are few relationships in life as complex as that of the mother of the bride and the mother of the groom. This is true not only as the two women prepare for the union of their children, but throughout the course of their lives. It becomes more true if there are ever grandchildren involved.

Marisa Silver dives into the dynamic in At Last, a sharp and perceptive novel that is heavy on characters if light on plot. The story follows the lives of Evelyn Turner and Helene Simonauer, who are thrown together, unwillingly, when their children decide to get married.

Helene was not at all happy about the union of Ruth — “this tall and rashly opinionated girl” — to Tom, her “otherwise responsible son.” Evelyn, for her part, sees the upcoming wedding as a tragic accident of timing. “Two years ago, [Ruth] met a young man on the street, and now they were getting married. If either she or Tom had been at that same spot five minutes earlier or five minutes later, Evelyn would not be driving around with a woman who clutched her purse on her lap as if she thought Evelyn might steal it.”

“The woman was a disturbance. Evelyn needed to be undisturbed,” Silver writes, letting us know that however disagreeable the women are, her own prose is going to be delightful.

Both Evelyn and Helene are widows, and the sort of women that are often described by others as a “piece of work,” but of course they don’t see it in themselves. They think if they can just get through the wedding and its preparations, they can retreat to their lives and not have to pretend to be nice to each other again.

That’s not how life works. But as the women’s relationship develops over decades, we learn stories from the past that turned them into who they become. Their own mothers are very much architects of their daughters, at least to a point. We witness Evelyn’s attempts to get out from the shadow of an insecure and sometimes cruel mother, and Helene’s efforts to keep her family functioning after her two siblings die in unrelated incidents.

The past is interspersed with the relationships of the present, always with Silver’s shrewd humor and her deep understanding of human nature. In one scene Helene takes Ruth to a hair salon, where she says, with all good intentions, “it looks to me like you haven’t had a good cut in quite a while.” As Ruth sits in the chair, the hairdresser looks at Helene.

“What a feral cat you’ve brought me, her raised eyebrows seemed to say. Oh, don’t I know it, Helene’s eyebrows responded. Satisfied, Helene picked up a copy of Ladies’ Home Journal and pretended to read about tapioca.”

The story’s complexity owes not just to current events but to past ones. At one point Helene comes across a packet of letters in her late husband’s things that indicate a secret relationship overseas. The letters were written in German between 1939 and 1943 by someone named Irina. (“It was the string, wrapped several times around the letters horizontally and vertically and then knotted, that made her know she was in the presence of something dangerous.”)

As Helene tries to figure out their meaning, she sets into motion the events that will culminate in Tom and Ruth meeting, and ultimately getting married, and having a daughter named Francine. The grandmothers, as grandmothers are wont to do, compete for the child’s affection as she grows up into a person old enough to have her own narrative in this story — it’s Francine who tells us, in her own words, what it’s like to be told by her parents that they’re getting a divorce, what it’s like to see her grandmothers ravaged by age and memory loss.

Silva has said that At Last has its roots in a childhood memory. One of her grandmothers, driving her to the other’s grandmother’s house, said “I know you love me more than her.” She was 4 at the time, but those words were burned into her memory and provided the scaffolding on which she built Helene and Evelyn’s story.

We hear her own experience when she writes, “When Francie was a newborn and Helene would go over to visit, Evelyn would be there more times than not holding Francie while Ruth rested. And so it was Evelyn who would ask Helene if she’d like to hold the baby, or if she’d like to give Francie a bottle, and it was Evelyn who would take the baby from her when Francie started to fuss, as if Helene didn’t know how to calm a child.”

This is Silver’s eighth novel, and it is expertly crafted. Despite the fine writing, it’s hard to imagine what audience it might find among men. It’s a novel of and about women and the intermingled tensions that hum through their lives. Mother-in-law and baby experience is not required to enjoy the story, but it helps. B+

Featured Photo: All Consuming, by Ruby Tandoh