In less skilled hands, “The Middlesteins,”  Jami Attenberg’s wrenching  novel about family life, especially Jewish family life, could have been a disaster.  Attenberg pulled it off.  The book has been called a “masterpiece of Jewish family life,” and I can’t go that far, but I’ll go far enough to say it’s a brilliant and thought-provoking and quite insightful work. Readable too.

For more than 30 years, Edie and Richard Middlestein have lived a quirky but conventional middle-class life in a Jewish suburb of Chicago. Richard had a chain of pharmacies mostly supported by fellow emigres in the Jewish community. Edie worked for a Chicago law firm helping developers build strip malls. They had two children, Robin and Benny and a couple of grandchildren.

Their lives unravel rapidly. Richard’s pharmacies are going broke as the Jewish community changes and scatters, but much more importantly,  Edie has become morbidly obese, obsessed with eating food of almost any kind anywhere. Her health is rapidly deteriorating – severe diabetes, heart disease – as her weight skyrockets to more than 300 lbs and doctors warn her that she is killing herself. Everyone in her family struggles to figure out what, if anything, they can do to save her. She seems disinclined to try and save herself.  Richard can’t take it any more – their marriage was awful even before Edie’s obesity – and he leaves her in great crisis, major surgery just months away. Family and friends are  horrified, non-comprehending, judgmental.

Attenberg’s characters are complex and  even though she treats them sympathetically, there are not an awful lot of people to like in this novel.  But the story is beautifully conceived. Nobody knows what to do with Edie or what to do about her. Benny’s controlling wife Rachelle becomes obsessed with trying to save Edie, even to the point of stalking her, following her around as she goes from McDonald’s to Chinese Restaurant stuffing herself. Rachelle bands Richard from her home or from visiting his beloved grandchildren. Richard gets an apartment, shrugs off the guilt and disapproval coming from his family and starts dating.

Everyone in this family is either inarticulate, angry, or repressed beyond the point of being able to communicate reasonably or articulate their own thoughts.

Richard is utterly unmoved by the clannishness,  condemnation and guilt that is often epidemic in Jewish and other ethnic and immigrant families. He is determined to try and be happy, even at 60 years of age. He believes it to be his right, that there is little point in spending the rest of his days watching his wife eat herself to death.  I have to say I was with him every step of the way, as unappetizing a person as he is. We learn in every kind of therapy there is that we cannot save other people, that people can only save themselves. This is something Richard got long before I did. I thought his escape was heroic in a very middle-class way. Edie, it turns out, is also looking for the same thing, and in the least likely of places.

Attenberg takes a piercing, sometimes angry, often funny, look at Jewish family values  from neurotic and overbearing child rearing to the dubious excesses of child obsession and the Bar Mitzvah ritual. She asks some large and difficult questions. What do we owe the people we live with? What do we owe ourselves? As someone who was born Jewish and grew up in the very culture she is exploring, I have to say she hit home again and again. It is tempting to see some of the people as caricatures but I grew up around every one of them and they did not seem caricatures to me.

I grew up seeing Jewish family life characterized in books, movies, TV – Woody Allen, Molly Goldberg – but it was never funny to me, I saw too much damage, too many victims. In a way, “The Middlesteins” is a novel about victims.

The characters in this book are all looking for love, something that often is smothered in oppressive ethnic ritual and especially in family obligation. I remember having a dreadful battle with my grandmother, who I loved, about the idea of Jewish boys marrying Christian girls. “But grandma,” I pleaded, “don’t we have a right to be happy?” She grabbed me by both cheeks, kissed me on the nose, and quickly said, “no,” she said.”Who is happy?”  I thought of Philip Roth and “Portnoy’s Complaint” (for me one of the great books of all time) when I read “The Middlesteins.” We make a lot of jokes about ethnicity and family, but when it comes down to it, Attenberg reminds us that it can be deadly stuff when it comes to living one’s life. Guilt and obligation are suffocating things, diseases in their own right.

This book is riven with longing, hope, loss and broken-hearts. Edie surprises us, not by what she says – she never once really talks about her obesity or confronts it, but what she does. No one in this book ever stops looking for meaning in life, even when it is elusive, unbearable and out of reach.  The book is also curiously timely as Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey struggles to deal with his own obesity as he considers a campaign for the presidency. Is this our business? Is it something only he can do for himself? Does he need to? How much of an explanation of his obesity does he owe us?

“The Middlesteins” explores the whole idea of family responsibility. What do we owe our parents? Our children? Who, exactly, is responsible for who, and to what degree? I know what my grandmother had to say and I was grateful to read what Jami Attenberg had to say in her terrific new novel. It is published by Grand Central Publishing and is available anywhere books are sold. If you wish to buy it, please consider purchasing it either through Battenkill Books, my local bookstore (518 677 2515 or [email protected]), or through your local independent bookstore. One of the many interesting things Attenberg does is tell us how things turn out – she skips ahead a decade in the narrative to tell us what becomes of these people, an innovative and curiously satisfying touch.

I recommend it. The writing is lovely,  restrained and precise, the ending is jarring and powerful. If I had a reservation, it was that we heard so little of Edie about her own dilemma. She is a tragic and ghostly figure who never seems to grasp her own life. But maybe that was the point.