The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg: Book review

Drink with this:

Eggnog

Sweetened dairy based cocktail, with whipped eggs and the liquor of your choice. It can be sophisticated - I had one with a massive bourbon kick in a retro milk bottle at this place, my absolute favourite restaurant in London: http://www.spuntino.co.uk/

It can also be over saccharine, and so creamy it will make you gag, with associations of holiday season over-indulgence. The picture below somehow feels typically American to me and something I can imagine Edie Middlestein consuming.

What’s what

Oh you books trying to be The Great American Novel, why can’t I quit you? Is it your pessimism and creeping malaise that keeps me coming back for more? Your elegiac portraits of a country I barely know being colonised by strip malls and soulless corporations? Or maybe your embittered and dysfunctional characters? Damn you and your addictive ways!

The Middlesteins has been described as the Jewish Corrections but you’ll be disappointed if you go into this expecting writing as piercingly good as Franzen’s. The novel opens in media res, with the Middlestein family members discovering that Richard Middlestein has left his ailing wife Edie after more than twenty-five years of marriage. Edie is obese and is dying from diabetes and its various complications.

Edie Middlestein, patron saint of Chinese joints everywhere. Well, thought Robin, if my mother lives in this alternate universe in this strip mall, at least it’s nice that they think she’s so amazing. “He’s got quite a story,” said Edie, and she nodded approvingly at the value of such a thing. A story! pg 139

The focus of this book is intensely narrow. There is a sense at times that it is reaching, purporting to say more about America, and about the nature of obesity and need, and yet it focuses exclusively on the interior lives of a few of its central characters. And even this access is incomplete - we only get one chapter from Edie’s daughter Robyn’s point of view and little resolution to her story. At times though the omniscient narrator drops in a choice phrase skipping us forward years or decades in the characters’ lives - these moments are highly effective, giving the impression of an epic stretch of time and lives laid out for our examination, with the highlights brought to our attention.

And then there he was, in a suit (it was his only suit, but she didn’t know that yet), and he was smiling (his happiest days were behind him the minute he met her, but he didn’t know that yet)pg 60

Attenberg’s characters, much like those of Franzen or Updike, are not particularly likable. Is this just the nature of this type of writing? Are we all so damaged and confused that contemporary state of the nation novels need to be populated with these horrible miserable people? Everyone in The Middlesteins is flawed and unpleasant and there are misunderstandings and communication failures galore.

They stopped and stared at each other, and there were a million things of a confrontational nature that still hovered between them, but Benny wondered if they were worth the battle, and then decided they were not, or that his father wasn’t worth it anyway, and he would deal with how sad that made him feel some other time. pg 158

Nobody in this book understands anybody else around them, and the reader is not permitted understanding of Edie. The plot and the other characters pivot around her, and yet we never get to inhabit her present day point of view. This is a clever strategy on Attenberg’s part, as the reader like the other characters can only wonder why Edie is killing herself with food; but it is also risky. I felt very emotionally detached from this novel until 80% of the way through, when it gathered me in to its pudgy, uncomfortable embrace.

There was a person there to connect with, a jawline, a smile, a clarity in the eyes. No flesh hung from her cheeks and chin as it did now. She was in focus, we could see her, we could see who she was—or who we thought she was anyway. Where had that Edie gone? pg 236

There are many sad and brilliantly acerbic lines throughout yet frustratingly we are never really given any insights into why Edie is so overweight. Attenberg suggests the obvious - that food is a way to subsume her feelings of need and longing, universal feelings which those around her drown out through drugs and sex and alcohol and control.

Middlestein and Beverly, two lonely people, successes, failures, a widow, a husband, caught up in something resembling love. pg 224

By the end I was a convert to this novel but I’m still not convinced it gets to the heart of any great American truth. If nothing else though, it has one near perfect chapter - the bnai mitzvah, with its witty and observant details, its collision of Jewish tradition and teenage trends, of the best and worst of family.

Verdict

Compulsively readable throughout, despite the moments of disgust and dislike, which eventually turn to a profound sympathy and identification with all those messed-up Middlesteins.

On the big screen

Little happens here in terms of plot - the narrative is all internal, and there are few visual set pieces. I don’t see this working as a movie.

Highbrow/Lowbrow

So it has Franzen’s seal of approval but I think it’s pretty low-rent when held up against The Corrections or Freedom.

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson: Book review

To drink with this

Old-fashioned

The manliest of cocktails. Picture Don Draper sipping alone in a darkened office, drowning his angst and alienation. The first documented definition of the word ‘cocktail’ listed the constituent ingredients of the old-fashioned, making it the quintessential American cocktail. Harsh whiskey and bitters, alleviated by sugar and a zesty citrus twist. Drink a few and drown the pain.

What’s what

Sherwood Anderson, according to wikipedia, was influential in the success of both Faulkner and Hemingway. Despite his unlikely name, he seems to have since faded from popular awareness. (Or so I assume - maybe this is a signifier of my benighted cultural awareness and you are sitting clucking at your laptop in disbelief, while caressing your much-loved tattered paperback version of Winesburg, Ohio.)

Reviews I have read of the book have described it as a volume of short stories, albeit interconnected by their setting in the small town of Winesburg. I don’t feel that this accurately sums up the novel though - each chapter may focus on a different character and encompass one particular event, yet characters from earlier stories pop up again and not just the town they share but the overarching themes are consistent across all the stories.

Look, if you insist on uplifting or feel-good reading material you won’t appreciate this. Personally I didn’t find this a particularly depressing book, but then I often think that early exposure to Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary and the Gormenghast trilogy has now inured me against literary sadness. Not to mention His Dark Materials - what in life or in books can compare to the separation of Will and Lyra? Worlds apart forever, people - what is an unhappy marriage when compared to that?! Sherwood, write something that makes me cry non-stop for three days and then we’ll talk about what’s depressing.

The tales that Doctor Parcival told George Willard began nowhere and ended nowhere. Sometimes the boy thought they must all be inventions, a pack of lies. And then again he was convinced that they contained the very essence of truth. Pg 18

Anderson is simply a beautiful writer, and Winesburg was ridiculously quotable. These vignettes of small town life were quite racy when published in 1919 and still feel quite unusual in that there is little plot aside from the day to day events in the lives or ordinary people.

In the presence of George Williard, Wing Biddlebaum, who for twenty years had been the town mystery, lost something of his timidity, and his shadowy personality, submerged in a sea of doubts, came forth to look at the world. Pg 4

The banal is juxtaposed with massive and overwhelming emotions. Anderson details the longing for expression, connection and understanding within all his characters. Each of his characters feel profoundly isolated and alienated from the town they live in and those around them. They all long to be understood and struggle with desires which they cannot even fully articulate to themselves, let alone work out how to achieve.

It seemed to her that between herself and all the other people in the world, a wall had been built up and that she was living just on the edge of some warm inner circle of life that must be quite open and understandable to others. She became obsessed with the thought that it wanted but a courageous act on her part to make all of her association with people something quite different, and that it was possible by such an act to pass into a new life as one opens a door and goes into a room. Pg 40

The narrator addresses the reader directly throughout, and despite the flat and laconic tone adopted the overall effect is of gentle melancholy.

Most boys have seasons of wishing they could die gloriously instead of just being grocery clerks and going on with their humdrum lives. But this is not the story of Windpeter Winters nor yet of his son Hal who worked on the Wills farm with Ray Pearson. It is Ray’s story. It will, however, be necessary to talk a little of young Hal so that you will get into the spirit of it. Pg 104

This philosophical and finely drawn sense of sadness pervades every chapter of the novel and somehow makes the detailed and often absurd character portraits even more poignant. Anderson is quoted in the introduction saying that he modelled his characters on people from his hometown, and the people of his novel all feel vivid and realistic. Anderson describes their inner tragedies dispassionately yet the reader can’t help but identify with his ordinary characters consumed by extraordinary feelings.

The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun. He shivers and looks eagerly about. The eighteen years he has lived seem but a moment, a breathing space in the long march of humanity. Already he hears death calling. Pg 121

Verdict

Deserves to be rescued from obscurity and lauded for its searing and beautifully written portrait of early twentieth century small town USA.

“I will do something dreadful if I am not careful,” she thought, and turning her face to the wall, began trying to force herself to face bravely the fact that many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.pg 56

On the big screen

These guys have done it already: http://winesburgohiothemovie.blogspot.co.uk/

I think I would go for a different approach. A series of hour long episodes for TV, each featuring one of the novel’s stories would in my opinion represent this sprawling and considered text better than a film could.

Highbrow/Lowbrow

Eminently readable but with the literary cachet of Faulkner and Hemingway.

There was nothing particularly striking about them except that they were artists of the kind that talk. Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately, almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does. Pg 84