In Jami Attenberg’s The Middlesteins, a contradiction:
On page 253, Kenneth is talking on the phone to his lover, Edie, the book’s heroine--mother, grandmother, and wife--who is killing herself with compulsive eating:
“But why should I care what he’s doing if I’m crazy about you?”
“We are allowed to have more than one feeling at once,” said Kenneth. “We are human beings, not ants.”
3 pages later, Kenneth is driving through the suburbs:
“Every mall looked the same from a distance, but he had spent enough time in them--his whole adult life--to know that they were all unique, even if it just came down to the people who worked there. Busy little American ants.”
That is the heart of the book for me, that we are both ants and human beings. We feel a thousand things at once, as Edie does, and also like Edie, one thing, suffering. And suffering, like hunger, is never present without the desire to end it. Each of the characters has a way of trying to mask suffering: food, wine, pot, sex, control. They lose themselves in these things, some more than others. They are there and not there. They surface, affect each other, cause each other joy or pain, and disappear again into themselves, into their coping.
On page 263, Richard, Edie’s estranged husband, eats and eats at her funeral.
As he stood there, alone, in a room full of people who would rather take the side of a woman who was dead than acknowledge his existence, he believed he at last had a glimmer of an understanding of why she had eaten herself into the grave. Because food was a wonderful place to hide.
This is the question: life or death, feeling a thousand things or feeling nothing.
The Middlesteins are only redeemed when they can emerge from their oblivions and feel, in the presence of other people. Redemption comes in shared emotion.
The very last paragraph, page 272:
There she was, alone by a tree, weeping for her grandmother. He wanted to weep, too. He went to his granddaughter and he hugged her and held her against him, and just like that, they were close. Until the day he dies, they were close. Wasn’t that strange? No one would have put the two of them together like that. No one would have figured they had much in common except being family. But they were close to the end.
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