Food appears so often and takes on so much importance in Jami Attenberg's novel The Middlesteins, that while reading it I sometimes felt like I was on a kind of literary cruise ship. But excess isn't presented here wantonly; instead, it's laid out and explored with sympathy, thought and depth. Early on, the parents of the main character think, "Food was made of love, and was what made love, and they could never deny themselves a bite of anything they desired." And so the novel takes off from the evocative starting point known as appetite.
The child of those parents grows up to be Edie Middlestein, the obese matriarch of the novel's eponymous family, who reaches well over 300 pounds before the book is through. The other Middlesteins know she is killing herself with food, but they are helpless to stop her.
After her husband, Richard, leaves her, Edie's adult children, Robin and Benny, become enmeshed in their estranged parents' lives. The family members' interactions and overlaps, their dissonant styles and divergent needs, create much of the drama of this novel, which sports a blurb from Jonathan Franzen and has its own Corrections-y, multiple-viewpoints-of-a-Midwestern-family feel to it, though with distinctly Jewish flourishes.
The way that adult children and their parents make their way through life, sometimes like a shared waltz, other times more like people shackled together on a chain gang, is rendered beautifully. The complicated dynamic between Robin and Edie comes through in a scene in which Edie takes Robin to a Chinese restaurant she frequents, and there Robin sees her mother not through the Middlestein lens, but through a new one:
"It was early, not even 5:00 PM, and the restaurant was empty, except for a young Chinese woman sitting before a giant pile of green beans spread on a table. She ... rushed toward Edie with open arms, and they quickly embraced."
When Edie finally introduces Robin, the woman says, "'The schoolteacher! What an honor to have you here. Your mother talks about you all the time. We love your mother. Just love her. She's our hero.'
Enlarge Michael Sharkey
Jami Attenberg is the author of The Middlesteins.