Sunday May 12, 2013
Family ties that hurt
Review by SHARIL DEWA
star2@thestar.com.my
Meet the Middlesteins, a funny, dysfunctional family that will make you laugh and cry.
The Middlesteins
Author: Jami Attenberg
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 273 pages
HOW could she not feed her daughter? Little Edie Herzen, age five: not so little. Her mother had noticed this, how could she miss it? Her arms and legs, once peachy and soft, had blossomed into something that surpassed luscious. They were disarmingly solid. A child should be squeezable. She was a cement block of flesh.”
Meet Edie, the matriarch of the Middlestein family, an ordinary Jewish family living in Chicago. Edie is a wife, mother, grandmother, lawyer, retiree, the glue that keeps the family together, and most definitely the novel’s central figure.
Into this mix of ordinariness, author Jami Attenberg throws in Edie’s problem: she is also an addict. To food.
Unsurprisingly, Edie is morbidly obese, has an advanced case of diabetes with all its attendant complications, and doctors have told her recently that she will die if she doesn’t lose weight.
Through a flashback chapter, we see what could be the root cause of Edie’s problem. As a young girl, Edie eats compulsively, and her mother is an enabler who encourages her daughter’s mindless consumption of calorie-laden foods.
We learn that Edie’s father escaped World War II’s Holocaust in the Ukraine and lived on potatoes until he reached America, and that Edie’s mother is a second generation German-American and thus more frivolous with her money than her husband.
These are clues that Attenberg lays out for us, though he doesn’t connect the dots: the only point that Attenberg drives in early on in the novel is that although Edie has a sharp mind, she is the prisoner of a gigantic appetite that can never be satisfied.
In her 20s, Edie becomes a practising lawyer, meets and marries her husband, Richard Middlestein, and has two children, Benny and Robin, with him.
Benny grows up to become a down-to-earth family man who is married to Rachelle and has twins with her while Robin turns into an angry young woman, unmarried and bitter at her lot in life.
When the novel opens, Richard and Edie have been married for more than 40 years. While they keep up the pretence of being happily married for their friends and neighbours, in reality, Richard and Edie have been emotionally and physically apart for a long time.
It seems Richard cannot compete with Edie’s other love – she loves food more than she loves him.
Faced with this conundrum, Richard leaves Edie, much to the bitter dismay of Robin, who wants her father to pay for every single wrong thing in her mother’s life. Benny, however, prefers to keep the peace between both parents.
To try to save their mother, Robin and Benny device plans to ensure Edie gets some kind of exercise and that she stays away from food of any kind.
The results of the plans are both laugh-out-loud hilarious and poignant. It also raises the question: to what lengths can you go in saving someone who does not want – in any way, shape or form – to be saved?
If you’re expecting a light-hearted Jewish comedy of manners, you will be disappointed. The Middlesteins is remorseless in its exploration of all that can go wrong between husbands and wives, parents and children.
While comedy seems ever present in The Middlesteins, it is of the black variety, and underneath the dark humour lies this sad fact: perhaps Edie eats because that is the only way she can feel fulfilled.
To illustrate her point, rather than recording Edie’s history through her age, Attenberg injects a sense of humour in a serious matter by chronicling her protagonist’s weight in the chapters that focuses solely on Edie (Edie, 65 pounds; Edie, 315 pounds, etc).
Praise is due Attenberg for being brave enough to give her readers a protagonist who is not instantly likeable. While Edie has never shied away from speaking her mind, what she has to say is not necessarily the most comforting or appealing thing.
And yet, despite her faults, I felt drawn towards Attenberg’s mammoth-in-size protagonist.
Attenberg also seamlessly jumps into each family member’s head to give their point of view on the problems that are Edie, having them deal with her obesity, their individual worries and, in the case of Richard, his loneliness at being separated from Edie.
Attenberg goes so far as to send Richard on dates with women he finds on the Internet.
Again, there is laughter in Richard’s quest to quell his loneliness with one-night stands, but underneath it all, there remains a sadness in his desire to not be alone.
The Middlesteins is an easy read, with the novel being made more readable by being broken into easy-to-manage chapters that alternate between Edie, her past history, Richard, Robin, Benny, and Rachelle.
The humour may be dark, and readers may find themselves squirming a little at laughing about the characters’ problems, but Attenberg has proven her genius in delivering a set of people so flawed they seem genuinely lost in this world.
Pick up The Middlesteins – you will not regret meeting the tour de force that is Edie and her dysfunctional family.
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