Review: The Middlesteins, by Jami Attenberg

As Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina: "Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way".

In Jami Attenberg's The Middlesteins, every member of the eponymous unhappy family is unhappy in his or her own way. The book revolves around Edie, the chronically obese grandmother who simply can't stop eating. Orbiting around her are Richard, her ex-husband hunting down new love in his 60s, her son Benny, who hides from the world through his nightly spliff (much as his mother finds solace in food), her daughter-in-law Rachelle, whose life is controlled by the need to appear the perfect Jewish mother and to stay as slim as possible, and her daughter Robin, drifting between places, drifting between childhood and adulthood, unsure of who she is and where she belongs.

The book declares towards its end that life is "full of layers and nuances, coloured all shades of gray", but unfortunately for this novel those shades of gray weren't quite nuanced enough. While there is some grayness about Edie - her family might want her to lose weight, but she doesn't seem particularly interested in doing so, and shouldn't she be left free to eat herself into the grave if she wishes? - the rest of the characters and plot feel very one-dimensional. Rachelle is almost a parody of the good Jewish wife, and even Richard (probably the second main character) doesn't feel like he has much depth to him, other than half a chapter on his arrival from Ukraine and establishment of his pharmacy store (seemingly pulled from the pages of a book - The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb (Theethnic history of Chicago) - read for research and mentioned in the acknowledgements).

I enjoyed reading The Middlesteins, although I felt that I came away from it with very little, other than the "morals" that family is the most important thing in life, at the centre of everything, a source of sometimes unlikely bonds between two individuals with little else in common; and that people find solace from life in all sorts of things - food, drink, drugs, organising b'nai mitzvahs - and just because one person's way of dealing with life is more socially acceptable than another's, it doesn't make them a better person.

The book is a very easy and very quick read, which might make it nice to flick thorough on a commute, but the reader's eyes glide across the words in the same way that the author glides across the surface of a lot of big issues - at no point does she let you fall into the gaps between the words and the characters' actions and find the difficult meanings, the nuanced grays, hidden in between.