The Middlesteins
By Jami Attenberg
Grand Central Publishing, 288 pages
Jami Attenberg’s The Middlesteins, her fourth novel, resists easy summary; though the plot is quickly digested (the matriarch of an eccentric family is eating herself to death), the book itself is a rich and sloppy feast. With equal parts affection and exasperation, Attenberg introduces four generations of an unforgettable family while depicting the claustrophobic devotion of parents and children, the consequences of denial and of overindulgence, and the tension between love and obligation, selfishness and martyrdom.
Front and center is Edie, the matriarch, six feet tall and more than 300 pounds of pure voracious will. Her father “was carnal, primal about food,” Attenberg writes. “He had starved on his long journey from Ukraine to Chicago…and had never been able to fill himself up since.” Edie’s mother, a “lioness who had a shimmer and a roar to her thick, majestic self,” agreed with her father in matters most important; namely, “how to have sex with each other (any way they wanted, no judgment allowed) and how often (nightly, at least).” To them, “food was made of love, and was what made love, and they could never deny themselves a bite of anything they desired.”
A generation later, these gloriously untrammeled physical appetites have led to disaster; Edie is morbidly, defiantly obese. Her weight has cost her a job, alarmed her children, ruined her health, and isolated her from her friends. As the book begins, her husband Richard has just moved out. “I should have treated him better,” Edie tells their daughter, Robin, who privately agrees; Edie may be fat, but she’s nobody’s victim.
Richard, the owner of several Chicago-area pharmacies, cannot stop thinking about his wife; his leaving the family home feels to him like exile rather than escape. Their son, Benny, a laissez-faire pothead, is married to the hyper-efficient Rachelle, who takes on her mother-in-law’s obesity as a personal crusade; she tails Edie around town monitoring what she eats and micromanaging her family’s diet until Benny and their teenaged twins resort to salting their food in secret. Benny’s sister, Robin, who has actively struggled to repress every trace of her mother, is fooling exactly nobody. She’s Edie writ small: “On a daily basis, she took great big gulps of feelings,” her boyfriend, Daniel, notes. (Robin also takes great big gulps of wine, which becomes a problem down the road.) Last but never least are Richard and Edie’s twin grandchildren, Josh and Emily, beloved products of a drunken fumble in Benny’s fraternity-house bathroom before he and Rachelle had even graduated from college. Their b’nai mitzvah, over which Edie presides like a magnificent fertility goddess, is the lavish feast that marks the novel’s climax.
Or one of its climaxes. The Middlesteins has no single plot; Attenberg’s narrative flashes forward and backward and zooms in and out. A scene that begins firmly inside one character’s perspective may shuffle through several more before settling on authorial omniscience. These shifts can be jarring, but they also have real power. When Robin finally begins to unclench enough to fall in love with Daniel, Attenberg addresses the reader without warning: “And would you hate her if she started to cry? Did she have you convinced that she really was that tough?” More than Robin’s icy resolve is thawed here; the rhetorical questions serve to dissolve the boundary between reader and character, with the result that the former comes to feel a bit like an honorary Middlestein.
Over the novel’s meandering course, the reader sees each character through the eyes of every other character, as well as from the inside out; this gives the book extra dimension as well as cozy warmth. Richard and Edie and their progeny may be infuriatingly headstrong busybodies, but they’re our busybodies, and if we indulge their flaws and forgive their self-righteousness, isn’t that just like family—or indeed, just like life?
Attenberg manipulates time as deftly as she does perspective, with equal lightness and skill. She projects the reader far beyond the events the book actually covers. So we know that Richard eventually remarries and that he grows especially close to his granddaughter long after the action of the novel ends. We know that Robin will suffer a miscarriage, then an alcoholic collapse, and we see Benny, a ghostly shadow of his middle-aged self, close up Richard’s pharmacy after his death. Even the answer to the novel’s central question (Will Edie die from overeating?) is revealed well in advance. It is to Attenberg’s tremendous credit that these potential spoilers never sabotage the plot. Nor do they set the reader apart from the action; in fact, observing from afar turns out to be a privilege granted only to intimate friends.
Just ask the Cohns, the Grodsteins, the Weinmans, and the Frankens, all of whom come to celebrate Josh and Emily’s b’nai mitzvah. “We could have sat closer, fought our way through the out-of-towners, but we’ve sat in the front enough in our lives,” they chime, in the manner of a benevolent Greek chorus. “Sometimes it’s better just to sit in the back and watch. Watch, listen, and learn, that’s what we say.”
Only Attenberg’s lackluster descriptions of food leave the reader out in the cold. Surely she could have done better than to call Chinese food “sizzling, decadent, rich, sodium-sugar-drenched” and draw our particular attention to “steaming, plush pork buns and bright green broccoli in thick lobster sauce, sticky brown noodles paired with sweet shrimp and glazed chicken.” Even the primal foodstuffs of Edie’s childhood seem generic; “salty liverwurst and red onion on warm rye bread” sounds fine, if you like that kind of thing, but no reader’s appetite will sharpen based on Attenberg’s tired, menu-like lists of ingredients and meals. Yet Edie keeps going, with an intensity that fascinates her granddaughter, Emily, who watches as Edie eats “head down, chopsticks in one hand, a spoon in the other, like it was a contest, like she was in a race, but it never seemed like she was going to finish, like her grandmother could eat forever and never get full.” Of course she can’t. Which makes perfect sense, since The Middlesteins isn’t a novel about food, or even about satiety. This charming book is about appetite, about wanting to shove life in with both hands, even if it kills you.