WHERE WOULD FICTION BE WITHOUT UNHAPPY FAMILIES?
The cruel, the withholding, the broken and estranged:
They’re all great, messy fodder for so much of the litera-
ture we love. (And so much safer to spend time with on
the page than in our own wildly imperfect lives.)
Glorious discord and damaged DNA are all over a pair
of new novels—though they don’t share a whole lot else in
the details, really, beyond an indelible voice and settings
somewhere below the Mason-Dixon Line. As Jami
Attenberg ’s All This Could Be Yours opens, the Tuchman
patriarch—“he was an angry man, and he was an ugly
man, and he was tall, and he was pacing ”—is about to keel
over in a New Orleans condo, taking (nearly) all his
secrets with him. Victor’s impending death is not exactly
a tragedy for those he’ll leave behind: wife Barbra,
a brittle, birdlike woman for whom “pretty and thin” isn’t
just a mantra, it’s canonical law; daughter Alex, a tightly
wound attorney still in the blast
radius of her recent divorce; and
wayward son Gary, a TV director
who would rather play stoned
hooky in his Los Angeles Airbnb
than deal with any of this.
Alex is eager to take care of unfin-
ished business, though what she
wants isn’t absolution but answers:
What exactly did Victor, with his
cigars and his long absences and his
shady “business associates,” actu-
ally do for a living? And why won’t
Barbra give him up? Toggling back
and forth through perspectives and
time, Attenberg (The Middlesteins)
gives each character their own rich
Books
Two masters of modern fiction, JAMI ATTENBERG and KEVIN WILSON, find
fresh inspiration in the family saga. BY LEAH GREENBLATT
EDITED BY → DAVID CANFIELD @DAVIDCANFIELD97 ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREA UCINI
