We Are Not Ourselves: A Novel
By Matthew Thomas
Simon & Schuster, 640 pages
Instead of going to the priest, the men who gathered at Doherty’s Bar after work went to Eileen Tumulty’s father.” So begins Matthew Thomas’s magnificent debut novel We Are Not Ourselves, a vast family saga that opens in 1951 in the borough of Queens. “Big Mike” Tumulty, a Schaeffer’s beer-delivery man, is both defiantly Irish (he works to keep his brogue, finding it “professionally useful”) and proudly American (he applies for citizenship the very first day he’s eligible). Locally, he’s more than beloved; he’s actively worshipped among the working-class Irish immigrants in Woodside: “He was reputed to be immune to pain. He had shoulders so broad that even in shirtsleeves he looked like he was wearing a suit jacket. His fists were the size of babies’ heads, and in the trunk he resembled one of the kegs of beer he carried in the crook of each elbow,” Thomas writes. “If you caught him in a moment of repose, he seemed to shrink to normal proportions. If you had something to hide, he grew before your eyes.”
To the men he drinks with, Mike’s a saint. To his only child, the plucky, preternaturally competent Eileen, he’s a fascinating enigma—proud, humble, invincible, and vulnerable all at the same time. Life in the Tumulty household is never dull, though it can be ghastly: Mike regularly drinks himself into rages, while Eileen’s mother, a cleaning woman for the Bulova watch factory, collapses into depression and alcoholism after a miscarriage. By the time she’s 13, Eileen has muscled her mother into rehab and is running the house herself. But she never dwells on or resents her upbringing; rather, she consciously plots her escape.
Eileen’s determination to better herself will come through real estate. Woodside, she decides, will never be enough—she imagines lolling idly in a storybook mansion or, if that’s too much, comfortably ensconced in a peaceful high-rise in the once elegant Jackson Heights. Her innocence is touching, but let no one underestimate her resolve; teenaged Eileen, like her formidable father, is a force of will. “Someone had to be born in a house like that; why couldn’t it have been her?” she muses, looking at old photos of a now demolished estate in Woodside. “Maybe she wouldn’t have been born there, but…she’d have found a way to get there, even if the others didn’t.”
To complete the fantasy, Eileen decides she requires a particular type of husband; she’s looking for “a man whose trunk was thick but whose bark was thin, who flowered beautifully, even if only for her.” She finds him in Ed Leary, a doctoral student in neuroscience. Like Eileen, Ed grew up Irish and poor, with alcoholic parents. To Eileen’s happy astonishment, he’s articulate, athletic, and brilliant, and she falls hard for him right away: “He wasn’t a stiff, and he wasn’t a weakling, either. What was the word for it? Sensitive was the only one that came to mind, amazing as that was to consider; he was a sensitive man. He soaked up whatever you gave him.” A year after meeting, they marry and move to Jackson Heights. Eileen is ecstatic.
The narrative seems, at first, to describe a deliberate trajectory toward the fulfillment of the American dream. Thomas is a careful, precise writer; even as he charts the slow rise of Eileen and Ed’s fortunes, he takes care to describe the difficulties, vexations, and setbacks that plague them every step of the way. The course of Eileen and Ed’s true love never does run smoothly. After the honeymoon, Ed’s “eccentricities curdle into pathologies.” He works too hard. He’s frugal to the point of absurdity. He’s indifferent to the status symbols Eileen adores—clothes, watches, furniture. They fight and make up and fight some more, and though Eileen learns to maneuver around Ed’s quirks, she refuses on principle to bulldoze him into submission. When Ed turns down a lucrative biotech job and then a possible position at NYU (preferring, instead, to continue teaching at Bronx Community College), Eileen swallows her bitter disappointment. Still, her ambition remains undaunted: “She had a vision, and she wasn’t turning away from it for a second…What waited ahead, if only Ed would walk into the path she’d laid out for him, was a beautiful life, an American life. ‘One day at a time,’ her mother said, and Eileen thought, And everything all at once.”
As the novel progresses, the reader longs for Thomas to make things easier for his heroine, just for a moment, just a little bit. But Eileen’s every step forward continues to be hard-won. She struggles to get pregnant, miscarries, and finally bears a son; her work as a nurse is unrelenting; her son, Connell, grows up to be a pudgy misfit who escapes, whenever possible, his rule-bound home. Even worse, Jackson Heights itself is deteriorating, its property values sinking and crime on the rise. Ed seems indifferent; lately, he has been acting peculiar and withdrawn. With a mounting sense of dread, the reader figures out what Eileen (whose real-estate obsession has kicked in again with a new focus on Westchester)either can’t or won’t acknowledge: Something awful and inexorable is happening to Ed’s brain. For 175 pages, as Eileen remains in denial, the evidence slowly mounts.
When a diagnosis finally comes, it’s both a shock and a relief: Ed, at age 51, has early-onset Alzheimer’s. “It was a paradox of sorts,” Eileen thinks after the doctor leaves them alone to discuss things. “Nothing made sense unless it were true, and yet it made no sense whatever for it to be true. It was so obvious now that he had Alzheimer’s. The news felt old already, somehow.”
“What are we going to do?” Ed asks Eileen, who waits a moment before answering.
“We are going to carry this with dignity and grace,” she tells him.
Her words are prophetic. Dignity and grace are the hallmarks of this quietly gorgeous novel. Eileen never succumbs to self-pity, and the book’s plot and style resist melodrama; as Ed’s illness progresses, Thomas’s writing remains meticulously, almost reverently matter-of-fact. Ed’s diagnosis divides We Are Not Ourselves neatly in two; in the second half, dozens of incidental details from the novel’s beginning slowly come to make sense.
We realize that Ed’s reluctance to take a better job or move to a better neighborhood was a symptom, not mere stubbornness. We see that Connell’s antipathy toward his parents grew directly out of his uneasy certainty that something at home was dreadfully wrong. And we now understand why Thomas spent so many pages describing Eileen’s childhood: Her pride and self-sufficiency (not to mention her early experience caring for her debilitated mother, her unflagging work ethic, and especially her relationship with her brilliant, mercurial father) were perfect preparation for the life she must now lead.
In the hands of a less skilled author, such neatness might seem overly crafted or even trite. But Thomas manages his plot so deftly that we merely marvel at the coincidences: They don’t feel like foreshadowing so much as fate. Throughout, the book has the texture of real life. Thomas pulls no punches—the descriptions of Ed’s physical and mental decline are graphic and tremendously upsetting—yet he resists the urge to sentimentalize Eileen’s devotion or to pathologize Connell’s inability to cope. Eileen takes comfort where she can find it—in material possessions, with a so-called shaman, even in the arms of another man. And Connell, though he spends most of the novel blinded by immaturity and selfishness, belatedly acknowledges and lives up to his mother’s ferocious ambitions and his lost father’s love.
In an extraordinary passage near the end of the book, Connell comes home from college and is shocked by how much his father has deteriorated since he last visited:
Early on in the illness, whenever Connell hugged him, his father squeezed back and said simply, “Good boy.” When his father began to lose his strength, the squeezes turned to pats; when he lost his coordination, the pats became pounding slaps…Then his father started to slur his words, so that all he could say clearly was “Good, good, good,” and then eventually that “good” gave way to an inarticulate sound—but Connell knew what it meant, even if no one else could have interpreted it. Then Connell would lean down to initiate a hug, and his father would reach up from the couch, until eventually his father didn’t reach up anymore but just patted his own knee. The final stage came when Connell noticed that his father patted his knee whenever Connell was even in the room. Now, though, in the wheelchair, he didn’t move at all.
This heartbreaking scene haunts Connell for years. He vows never to have children of his own—what if he inherits or passes on Ed’s disease? Yet in the book’s final pages, Connell has an epiphany that amounts to a reversal of heart. “He could honor his father by loving the kid the way his father had loved him,” he suddenly realizes. “He would hug his kid as much as he could. ‘Good,’ he’d say. ‘Good. Good.’”
We Are Not Ourselves is a devastating book, but it is never pessimistic. In the end, it’s a testament to familial affection, which transcends the limits of human frailty and even persists beyond the loss of what we call self.
