Nom de Plume

There are some books that become inextricably linked with a time or a place, and even looking at the spare cover (with the Today’s Book Club logo on it that almost dissuaded me from reading it entirely) makes me think of our Oregon trip and camping next to a peaceful lake in the pine trees. Ahh, those halcyon days. Wait a minute–oh, yes, that was the site where we had the generator on one side and three full generations of alcoholics on the other who only shut up after they lost and rediscovered their car keys twice and the camp host came over thrice.

But anyway.

The Schwartzes live in Bellwether, Connecticut, a place that is exactly as it sounds: staunchly middle class, white, relatively affluent. But underneath all this perfection, of course, lurks something else (insert Jaws music). Bernard, the father is ineffectual and clinically depressed–if affable–after his wife leaves him and moves to California. Chris and Cathy, the two children, muddle along until Bernard combines pills and ends up in a coma. No one knows how to deal with it. And so they don’t–even when Bernard awakens with the mind and motor skills of a child.

This was an odd novel. I liked it. It certainly wasn’t one of those blend-into-the-rest-of-them sorts of books. I could say that it represents the breakup of the American nuclear family, or turns the Holden Caulfiend coming-of-age on its head, or even that it’s about the never-ending ability of Americans to remake themselves. And while none of these are false, what really makes this book is the fact that Sharpe manages to convey all the heartbreak of the Schwartz family without ever losing his sense of humor or irony.