Book Review: ‘A Reason to See You Again,’ by Jami Attenberg

A REASON TO SEE YOU AGAIN, by Jami Attenberg

If the characters in Jami Attenberg’s novels existed on Google Maps, their collective pin would probably drop at a spot called Dysfunction Junction. The smart, deeply flawed people who populate her stories — usually Jewish and located somewhere within the urban flux of New York, Chicago or New Orleans — tend to be driven by art and ambition, along with infidelity, addiction and an almost pathological knack for family schisms. The urge to be likable does not consume them; one could say they are largely immune to the charms of being charming. But the texture of real, messy life lurks in the fallouts, failures and neuroses that spill across the page (and often down their throats; this gang like their alcohol).

The subjects of Attenberg’s latest family vivisection, “A Reason to See You Again,” are still marginally intact when we meet them in the suburbs of Chicago circa 1971. Rudy Cohen, the patriarch, is a sweet-tempered Holocaust survivor whose fragile health compels his anxious American wife, Frieda, to play constant nursemaid. And there’s a familiar sibling yin and yang to their two daughters, the calm waters of 15-year-old Nancy — “Demure, pretty. Mildly interested in lots of things but not one thing especially” — balancing out the clever, congenitally intense Shelly, already a fierce presence at 12.

But a game of Saturday-night Scrabble reveals deeper fissures. Rudy, “daydreamy and faint and beautiful,” is distracted by thoughts of his own private world, specifically the members-only club downtown where his lightly concealed homosexuality can roam free. And poor frizzy-haired Frieda can’t even let her youngest daughter win, bumping the board with an accidentally-on-purpose elbow when Shelly puts down a triple word score.

Rudy, alas, is not long for this world. By the start of Chapter 2 he’s already gone, and so is the tenuous solidarity of the Cohen family unit. Five years have passed and Shelly, now nearly 17 and itching to set her big brain free, finagles her way to college in California, while Nancy finds escape via early motherhood, shedding her Judaism and modest career goals for a shotgun wedding with a cute, lunky guy named Robby.

Both girls are glad to put as many miles as they can between themselves and Frieda, whose grief — and the river of martinis and boxed wine on which she’s riding it — has turned her raw and mean. (“In that era of their lives together, she could not see their value, only that they were sucking her dry. Where was her pleasure? Where was her joy?”)