Family History (the novel, not mine)

After I read that Dani Shapiro essay in Salon, I did my usual sleuthing on Dani Shapiro. I found her website, I read a short story I liked well enough (what actually caught my eye was that the story appeared in One Story which I just discovered because a friend had a story accepted there), I read some essays about her mother (one of which, it turned out, I'd already read in a magazine, but I hadn't registered that it was by Dani Shapiro, because I hadn't registered Dani Shapiro), and then I moved on.

Then last week when we were moving things out of my dad's house, I found Family History, her most recent novel, on a shelf, and I stuck it in a box and brought it home. I started reading it that afternoon. M and I went to the cafe to recover from the day. It was the hipster cafe, not the families cafe. M was the only kid and I was the only fortysomething mom (or at least, the only visible fortysomething mom), and I sat there and watched the hipsters whiling away a rainy Saturday late afternoon in the cafe, reading, or knitting, or tapping on their laptops, and tried to remember what it was like not to have kids and to while away rainy Saturday late afternoons in cafes. Then on the third page of the book, the heroine, Rachel, writes about her daughter going away to camp and wondering what it would be like without her--and then discovering the pleasures of childlessness, and then missing her--and it was one of those moments of fiction/life synchronicity and I thought about coming home and blogging about it, but decided I should read the book first.

The other thing I thought, as I began the book, was that it was strikingly reminiscent of We Need to Talk About Kevin: a mother alone in a house after her child has done an unspecified terrible thing, piecing together the pieces.

Family History is not as good as We Need to Talk About Kevin, which is transcendently good, but it is very good indeed. If we want to continue talking about contemporary women's literary realism, which of course we do, Shapiro is truly adept. This is realism of the sort that feels absolutely real--real places, real characters, real feelings--yet takes you into places you hope never to go but are compulsively fascinated by: the terror of losing your child and all your bearings. The writing is not showy, not even beautiful, but seamless and compelling. The plot is convincing and never expected. Really, a very good novel.