Flusfeder’s slim to emaciated novella – a mere 75 pages – is set in two separate years, 1970 and 1974. In New York in 1970, where they have apparently rarely heard of paragraphs, since this novel contains very few of them, we meet Emma Hoffman, a discontented writer who lives on the Upper West Side of the city, and has spent most of her marriage hosting upscale parties. Invitations to such parties are supposedly the social cachet of the in-crowd.
Emma has an unpleasant-sounding husband called Nicholas Sawyer, a Park Avenue doctor. They are Jewish, just: she has had “an assimilated Long Island childhood”, and occasionally “lapses into Yiddish” when she tells him before their marriage that she is “not such a metsiye [bargain]”. His grandfather had arrived “from pogrom Europe with the name Seger and quickly changed it”, his grandson “not having the gumption to change it back”.
But they marry anyway and though her writing dries up, she pours all her energy into the upbringing of their son, Little Nicky.
Perhaps because of the writer’s block, or that the parties similarly come to a halt – I couldn’t tell – Emma cannot go on.
Four years later, in 1974, Little Nicky is about to mark his 11th birthday and we join him on a meandering walking tour of Manhattan. It transpires that Emma is no longer around and has left a cache of letters for her son, to be opened on each birthday. Poor Nicky is left to make sense of this abandonment, as is the reader.
Much of your enjoyment of this novel will depend on whether you are engaged by Flusfeder’s modernist, stream-of-consciousness writing style. Thoughts batter back and forth, sentences are left unresolved as Flusfeder paints a bitter marital portrait of two dissatisfied people who simply irritate the hell out of each other.
“Who does she think she is…?,” writes Flusfeder, “which is such a good question because she doesn’t know who she is, and she’ll have the salad, with the dressing on the side, and maybe just a fillet of fish, broiled, no sauce, and her husband, with his clerkish attention to the leather-bound wine list, his filet mignon and baked potato with sour cream and chives and yes, why not, the minestrone to start, and she tries not to wince at his attempt at the inflections of an Italian accent, and he pretends not to notice that she has winced…”
For my part I found it alienating. I kept hoping I was going to sympathise with Emma or even Nicholas, who has a “laughable sexual technique”, despite his numerous affairs.
But no: both of them remain resolutely dislikable, she with her many neuroses and he with his inability to understand her.
With the best will in the world I was not engaged by Little Nicky or either of his parents. Others may find the Sawyers more charming.
Something Might Fall by David Flusfeder is published by Salt Publishing
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