Home
A FRIEND OF THE FAMILY,
by Lauren Grodstein.
Algonquin. 302 pages. $23.95.
Growing up gentile in the Catskill borscht belt, I was awed at the effortless wit of Jewish classmates whose nimble minds and tongues resembled Lauren Grodstein's. She fills this novel with an entire New Jersey enclave of rich Jews who enjoy limitless possibilities marinated in angst.
A family physician is seized with horror if he allows their only child to make his own choices. From the beginning, we know that the doctor has done something very bad. But what?
In the first sentence we find him exiled to the room their son is vacating over the garage. On the final page (it could be a moment later, since past and present consort wildly in his streams of consciousness), his son loads a U-Haul and drives out of their life: "The U-Haul has left a trail of blackish oil on our drive and down our street, and it could lead him back like Hansel if he needs to come back home."
Grodstein's superb storytelling entices us to keep plunging deeper despite dread of an ominous undertow: the doctor is still infatuated with his old girlfriend, now wife of his best friend and best friend of his wife. His own marriage is predictable, "comfortably quiet," relying on familiar subjects, "oldies-but-goodies . . . to keep the engine of our marital discourse lubed."
His persistent foreboding, his drive to analyze and control, lays bare his churning emotions. He cannot heal all his patients or bring back the dead or stop the rumors.
He is a friend of many families and cares about his patients. He describes one young Goldman Sachs associate as a new father, "a Harvard-certified genius, the kind of Renaissance whiz who beat an old Russian at chess in the park at dawn, made a client ten million by lunch, took a fifteen-minute break to make all the right picks in a rotisserie baseball league, and relaxed after dinner by fiddling a Haydn number on his cello." When the man dies at 30, the doctor watches from the corner; the family stands "around the hospital bedside, murmuring their wretched, dreadful goodbyes" and the baby silently grips "his finger the way babies do" as he slips away.
With writing fine as this, it is not oppressive to spend the entire book inside the narrator's head, awash with shame, disappointed in his son, reassuring himself: that "everything I've ever done in my life -- I've done it for him."
Anne Grant (grant275@cox.net) writes about families caught up in Rhode Island's Family Court at littlehostages.blogspot.com.
