(photo: June Marie, creative commons license)
By Matthew Thomas, read by Mare Winningham – I have mixed feelings about this lengthy novel (21 hours in audio; 640 pages in print). The story follows the life of Eileen Tumulty, born in 1941, her rocky relationships with her alcoholic Irish-American parents, her thirty-year-or-so marriage, her career and experience of being a parent to her son, her husband’s early-onset dementia, and into her widowhood.
At its core, it is about relationships, yet the relationship between husband and wife remained a mystery to me, as it changed over time, and that between father and son is fully explicated only in the last pages through the rather clunky device of a posthumous letter. Though the letter was quite moving in some passages, others refer to events I did not recall “seeing” in the book. Eileen’s arm’s-length relationship with her parents carries forward; her grown-up son Connell says the hug she gives him is the first time in his memory (she disagrees) that she has ever initiated such an embrace. One of the book’s strengths is the complexity of the characters. They have strengths and flaws that shape their interactions believably.
Eileen’s a smart girl, but family finances limit her educational choices, and she becomes a nurse, when she wanted to be, could have been, a doctor. She meets and marries neuroscientist and college professor Edmund Leary, who stubbornly refuses the more lucrative and prestigious job offers that come his way. Eileen sees his choices as a brake on the family’s upward mobility.
Connell loves baseball and is an excellent young player, but Eileen pressures him to give it up to join the school debate team, which she thinks will lead to the best grades, the best colleges, the greatest success. Eileen is preoccupied for much of the middle of the book in getting the family out of their deteriorating Jamaica, Queens, apartment and neighborhood and into a “nice” house in suburban Bronxville. The family finances barely make the stretch, but she plows ahead anyway.
Meanwhile, Ed is deteriorating, and the onset of neurological decline must be terrifying to someone so acutely aware of the consequences. We see Ed struggling to accommodate. I couldn’t understand why Eileen, a nurse, takes such a long time to figure out what was going wrong with him. It didn’t seem to be denial. That aside, the author does a remarkable job portraying the challenges the family confronts as Ed’s capacity declines. Paradoxically, Eileen seems most loving and most deeply attached to him as he becomes less able to respond.
Despite the grim subject matter, the writing is perceptive and never maudlin. Thomas maintains a straightforward style much like Eileen’s own, though, for 21 hours of listening, I’d like a little more story, and occasional plotlines seemed nonessential, like Eileen’s improbable and expensive drift into the orbit of a faith-healer.
Other reviewers have praised this book highly, and it has many strengths in the writing that made me want to stick with it. I freely admit I’m not a big fan of relationship novels, so that may account for my cooler response. While it is lauded for its depiction of late 20th century mores, to me it is more significant as a cautionary tale of what can go wrong in our lives and relationships while our attention is elsewhere.