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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
"No Ordinary Matter"
By Jenny McPhee
272 pages
Free Press
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Jenny McPhee's modern young women are not caught in the same dilemma, yet they, too, struggle to find their footing with or without men or children. In "No Ordinary Matter," two sisters, Lillian, a beautiful neurosurgeon, and Veronica, a soap opera and musical comedy writer, hire a private investigator to probe the circumstances of their father's death 25 years earlier, ultimately unearthing startling family facts. Along the way, a series of coincidences occur: For one, Alex Drake, the handsome new actor on Veronica's show, has unknowingly impregnated Lillian in a one-night stand, which Lillian orchestrated to conceive a child.
Supposedly random occurrences such as this one are McPhee's specialty, and she layers her plot lines with scientific inquiry, often pitting the factual world against the more malleable constructs of psychology and choice. Of Lillian for instance, McPhee writes, "Abandonment, jealousy, anger, and resentment were all feelings she usually absorbed and deflected with the ease and precision of a superconducting magnet."
The sisters meet regularly at a pastry shop, each one often dressed to the nines and spouting breezy repartee that passes for sisterly confidences. "When she had told Lillian about the breakup, her sister had said very little more than 'Perhaps there is a God.' 'Should I call him?' Veronica had asked. 'Cold turkey, it's the only way' ... 'I think we have to stop meeting in this place,' Lillian said. 'I mean, the art is just so consistently bad, I'm reduced to reassessing your ex-boyfriend's talent.'"
The novel's angle on parenthood is complex -- the ending truly illustrates this point, but there are plenty of other examples. Their mother is absentee, off raising farm animals in New Zealand, their father's death is shrouded in mystery, and Lillian eschews partnership in raising a child. "A few months earlier Lillian had announced to Veronica that she had decided to have a baby. She was thirty-five ... there was no man she was particularly interested in and certainly no one she wanted to share the experience with ... She would just have to rely on Margaret Mead's dictum: Fatherhood was a social invention."
For McPhee, it would seem, the world is a fascinating machine with intricate parts that somehow fit together: Broadway, television, brain chemistry, academia, motherhood, family, feminism, beauty, jealousy, love, sex and work -- and that's what she models her novel on. It's a heady mix, and an ambitious undertaking. She has wit and patience with her sometimes exasperating characters, and a demonstrated skill as ringmaster to her intricate plot circles and the ideas that make them swirl.
"What to Keep"
By Rachel Cline
304 pages
Random House
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Rachel Cline's "What to Keep" is another novel about parental neglect and a daughter coming to terms with her own responsibilities to herself and others, an appraisal, naturally, that includes her own version of motherhood. The book is divided into thirds, taking place when the narrator is 12, 26 and 36. Denny Roman is a precocious, lonely girl whose neuroscientist parents, Charles and Lily, are distant and preoccupied: "No one identifies their six-year-old girl's willfulness as 'passion' but Charles and Lily did recognize in Denny an emotional immediacy that was genuine, relentless and entirely new to both of them."
When Lily has a car accident on the day of Denny's debut as an actress in a middle-school play, Lily wanders their town, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, in a muddle, forgetting her engagements and even her identity. "The thing that Lily has never been able to see around the sides of is being a mother. Even while working sixty hours a week, even when Denny was asleep, even when she and Denny were always together and their relationship made perfect sense to her, the role of mother did not. Even more than a doctor, even more than a wife, a mother is an 'other,' whose existence always seems incomplete -- and maybe that's why, in Lily's state of burgeoning concussion, it is the first thing she lets go."
