A Family, and Nation’s, Search for Self in “A Reason to See You Again” https://ift.tt/4hUZb0V
The pink push button phone with the receiver off the hook on the cover of Jami Attenberg’s latest novel, A Reason to See You Again, perfectly encapsulates the frustrations and missed connections throughout the story that accompany the family communication. The missed calls, misunderstandings, miscommunications and long-standing misbeliefs that keep family members apart are a huge element of the story of the Cohen family.
And then there is that opening line, “Oh, the games families play together,” which serves as a guiding metaphor for the Cohen’s family’s attempts at intimacy amid changing societal rules and norms. The novel grapples with the kinds of missed expectations, crossed signals and estrangements that are familiar to anyone who has been part of a family. These issues are exacerbated by each member’s search for a way to define themselves in a way that exceeds their role in the family.
The novel centers on the Cohen family: closeted Holocaust survivor Rudy; his wife, discontented and alcoholic Frieda; and daughters Shelly, a smart workhorse who struggles with her own sexuality, and Nancy, pretty and demure, who is always looking for the approval her family never gave her.
Attenberg uses a Scrabble game to start the book and introduce the characters in a summary fashion. As the book goes on, the characters step more fully into the traits outlined in the beginning. Rudy dies early, leaving the Cohen women to cope with their grief without his uniting force. Shelly escapes to the West Coast and a demanding job in technology. Nancy gets married young to a traveling salesman with a wandering eye and has a daughter, Jess. Frieda escalates her drinking and moves to Miami looking for love.
Each seeks self-knowledge and mourns the idealized family life they feel is lacking. As Shelly muses: “Families just didn’t sprout out of nowhere; they required work . . . Having a family was like having an extra spine. If it was strong. If it could hold together.”
There are plenty of novels about families who can’t seem to find a way to really know each other. What makes A Reason to See You Again stand out is that each family member’s search for self is juxtaposed with a nation in search of itself in the turbulent 40-year period of societal change beginning in the 1970s.
The Cohen journey offers insight into larger issues. Nancy’s experience as wife and mother reflects the perfectionism and isolation of motherhood of the time as she tries to mold Jess. Shelly’s climb as a tech executive showcases the workaholic expectations and corporate sexual mores of the nineties. Frieda’s poverty and alcoholism illustrate the challenges of older women on their own. Each of the Cohen women are on a search to improve themselves, whether that means buying a new outfit, embracing a new philosophy or finding a new boyfriend.
Alternating vignettes show the family moving in and out of each other’s lives, holding each other at arm’s length as they struggle with desire and addiction. Maybe it is the changing focus or the author’s unflinching look at the character’s flaws, but I had a hard time feeling close to these women, whatever hard times they were experiencing. While their journeys are interesting, I, too, felt like an outsider to this complex family.
It is Nancy’s daughter, Jess, who offers hope for the next generation of Cohens. She forms a bond with her Aunt Shelly that helps her become comfortable with herself. Jess embraces her sexuality in a way her grandfather could not. Her work becomes not just an escape as it was for Shelly but an extension of herself. While the older generation had secrets, Jess’s tattoos become a statement about who she is and more. “She was making a map of something in her work, and it was spilling into her skin. She was trying to make her way to a kind of complete feeling. Knowing she would never be done, knowing even then that completion was never attained in life, but there were moments when certain things could be finished.”
This acknowledgment of the incompleteness, the “what’s next” nature of life, rings throughout the book, making it an ultra-realistic depiction of the ups and downs of family relationships.
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