Just as I learned of the work of
Liane Moriarty after seeing Big Little Lies, I became familiar with the
work of Jean Hanff Korelitz after the movie adaptation of her novel Admission
an admirable, if not remarkable, comedy starring Tina Fey and Paul
Rudd. While I began to devour Moriarty’s
work almost immediately after Big Little Lies ended, I ended up taking a
longer route getting to Korelitz’s novels. I don’t know how much of a gap there
was between my initial reading of Admission until I got to You Should
Have Known but it was a few years. After that I have followed her work
closely and faithfully.
For those who know of You
Should Have Known only through the HBO Limited Series The Undoing I
should tell you that while the limited series is outstanding, it is different
in subject from the novel. Kelley decided to frame the series as more of a
thriller and that was a valid choice. The novel is a different kind of read but
no less absorbing as the husband is off stage from the first section of the
novel and Korelitz chooses to focus her energy on how the wife comes to realize
that her entire marriage has been a lie and that she never truly knew her
husband. I believe you can enjoy both for what they are.
Korelitz has written ten novels
in her career and I have read almost all of them. There are tonal similarities between the
books and in quite a few of them, it’s clear they share the same space but they
have several different themes that border the line between humor and thriller. The
Plot, which came out two years ago, is tonally similar to her first novel, A
Jury of Her Peers, which can best be described as a far more plausible
explanation for the change in the criminal justice system in the last half a century
than the actual world we live in. The
Devil in Webster takes place at a college in New England and involves an
academic firestorm that compared to some of the ones on college these days
actually seems fairly tame. The White
Rose is a marvelous retelling of Der Rosenkavalier set in 21st
century New York about the most unlikely of love triangles as well as an affair
involving age and class.
Yet it is her most recent novel The
Latecomer that I feel is her best work to date. Always engrossing,
alternately brilliant satirical and horribly painful, it reminds in all the
best ways of the work of John Irving with one key codicil that I feel you
should know.
I have read more than my share
of Irving in my life and I have always been absorbed by his prose and his
characters. Yet every single one of his novels – yes even World According to
Garp and Cider House Rules – could, in my opinion, have benefited
from some judicious editing. Years ago I saw the brilliant Jeff Bridges-Kim Bassinger
move The Door in the Floor and only later learned it was based on the
first half of an Irving novel. Years later I got around to reading A
Widow for One Year and my first thought was not only did the filmmakers
make the right choice in only filming the first part of Irving’s novel but that
Irving himself should have stopped right there as there was nothing in the rest
of the book truly worth remembering.
The Latecomer, by contrast, has all of the
earmarks of a great Irving novel. It tells the story of a single family and
tells that story over the better part of a half century. One of the major
characters is defined by a personal trauma that he never shares and throughout
the novel, each character learns part of this problem but never the full
truth. The novel takes place with
critical details to a major part of life and involves not only politics but
several of the critical issues of our lives today. There is a major apparently
climatic event and then it turns out there is more to it and resolution comes.
The sole difference is that in Korelitz’s work there is not an ounce of fat
that you find in much of Irving’s work: it clocks in at just under 440 pages
and there doesn’t seem to be a detail wasted.
The Latecomer is the sage of the Oppenheimer
family. The novel is divided into three parts which is both fitting and not
fitting. The first part is called ‘The
Parents and takes place from 1972-2001.”
It tells the story of Salo and
Johanna Oppenheimer, who first meet in the worst possible way. Salo has survived
an auto wreck in which he was the driver. Two other people were killed but he escaped
with minor injuries. Salo Oppenheimer comes from a family of wealth and privilege
but is broken in ways that not even understands. People consider him tragic when he suffers
this accident at the age of nineteen because his girlfriend died and many
people thought they would marry. Salo did nothing to discourage this even
though he never even felt anything for her romantically. He has spent his life in what amounts to drift
and the accident just causes him to keep drifting.
At the funeral, he meets but
does not notice Joanna. Joanna is going through a similar drift in her life:
she has siblings but is completely unremarkable and has been ignored by her
family. She has no idea what she wants to do with her life and the moment she
meets Salo she decides, without thinking much, to devote her existence to
making this broken man whole. That this is something she is incapable of doing never
occurs to her until it is far too late.
There are, to be clear, only two
things that make Salo whole. One is his discovery of modern art in an era when
most people in the world and certainly in his class cannot. For years he buys
paintings of modern artists and keeps them in warehouses. He spends much of his
life going to them over the years at the expense of everything else: something
that his wife can’t understand. The other, more important, things comes when he
goes to an exhibition and meets a woman named Stella and she knows him without
introduction. I will not reveal the circumstances; all I will say is it that is
here he finds the only happiness he ever does – but it is by this point nearly fifteen years into his
marriage.
Joanna quickly realizes the futility
of being able to make Salo happy on her own and decides the next step is to
become a mother. This is far easier said then done because years of effort
result in nothing. Two years later, she begins the first IVF treatment. This
takes four more years by which point her
beleaguered specialist suggest surrogacy. Because Joanna seems to need to be
able to have the children herself she refuses. Finally four perfect eggs
emerged and she chooses to have three fertilized, with ‘one more for the road.”
Inexplicably it works and she has triplets.
It is only after she has given
birth that Joanna realizes she has spent so much time, energy and money on
becoming a mother that she realizes (again too late) that Salo does not want to
be a father and even worse she has no idea how to be a good mother. She has several false assumptions from the
start: that their wealth and privilege will make all the children happy, that
them being born as a set will build an instant connection, and their father’s
love will be enough for them. In all three she is horribly mistaken: the three
children almost from the start do not want to be together no matter how much
effort Joanna takes to force them to be.
They furthermore do not seem to have much of a connection with anyone
else by the time they get to their primary school, Walden.
To call Walden a progressive
school is to call France a European country: it is the barest description of it
but it doesn’t come close to defining it. Korelitz has a lot of fun describing
this institution which is so loose in its studies that there’s an argument the
only thing you can truly major in is liberal guilt. This is a school which wants to claim that is
for the people, even though it is almost exclusively open to the one percent, a
school that is inclusive even though the student body is not only almost entirely
white but mostly Jewish and a body determined so determine to make you feel
guilty about your privilege yet coddle you so much that there are no grades and
you can not fail a single course. This school claims to prepare you for the
world in every way – until the student body is about to approach college and
the parents come to the stunning realization that being in a school where all
students are supposedly equal might not get them into the colleges of (the
parents) choice. You honestly think the
college counselor position at this school must have the highest turnover rate
at Walden.
By the time all three Oppenheimer
siblings reach this point, all of them are unified in one goal: they all want
to get away. From each other, and possibly their parents. Why all three of them
feel such contempt for each other is never clear but there is a real
possibility that all three have essentially sensed the fact that their parents
do not love each other and that they are angry at their mother’s increasingly
frantic determination to bond them. There is also a possibility that all three
siblings have inherited their parents drifting through life without knowing it.
And there’s no way they would know: the Oppenheimer parents barely talk about
anything.
By this point Sally, the only
girl, has become aware of her father’s mistress. She has actually learned it by
the time she turns thirteen but does not think to share it with her siblings or
even her mother. Perhaps she feels that she wants something entirely to herself
and it is just as likely she realizes this is what her father has spent his
life on and not their family. By now the rest of the Oppenheimer’s have
realized that their father cares far more about his art then he does them,
which by now he has moved to a warehouse in Red Hook. He spends far more of his
time there than he does with his family but only Sally knows why he’s really
there – until Joanna finds out the truth in the worst possible way.
At that point Joanna is facing
an empty nest and the dissolution of her marriage. So she does something
impulsive and selfish. It is, we later learn, the only thing the triplets ever
agree on growing up. She gets the final embryo out of the freezer and tells
Salo she is using a surrogate to give birth to another child. She reveals what
she knows to Salo in order to get it done, which leads to the birth of the
fourth Oppenheimer sibling: Phoebe.
The second part of the novel is
called The Triplets and deals with their first year at college. One of the
ironies that Korelitz makes clear is that for all their determination to not be
like each other, all three siblings spend their first year doing variations of
the exact same thing. All of them have been suffering from the same drift that
their father has and are trying to find a way forward as well as a human
connection.
Harrison is considered by both
his siblings as insufferable but he is as sympathetic as the two. He is a
prodigy and intellectual by anyone’s standards and he has been forced to earn
his education at a school where his intellect is not only unappreciated but not
even acknowledged. The school’s curriculum
does nothing to help. I think even the most enlightened students would be frustrated
to have to study the Freedom Summer in consecutive years in the exact same fashion
just to say how it makes them feel one year later. Harrison spends a lot of time with the faculty
desperately trying to find a way to study the things he wants to study and he
is shunned because they are – gasp – part of the studies of dead white men and
classical education, something that the entre faculty considers evil just for
existing.
Finally Harrison finds a way forward
in the most unlikely place: a college called Roarke in New Hampshire which
teaches classical education as well as involves manual labor. (Harrison is fine
with the education part; he quickly comes to hate the fact that he’s going to
have to be killing chickens for everyone’s dinner.) He also wishes to meet his
idol Eil Abasalom Stone, an African-American prodigy who wrote a book at age
fourteen dissuading American liberalism. He goes to this school and begins to
find the camaraderie he has spent his life yearning for and which Stone
demolishes in an action that we don’t comprehend that splits the school. Harrison is so desperate for Stone’s approval
that he doesn’t even know he’s chosen a side until he’s done it which leads to
Stone considering him a friend.
Harrison has lived his entire
life in the bastion of liberalism that it is only when Eli calls him a
conservative that he comes to accept and it is a shock to him. Going forward his behavior will seem loathsome
to many but it’s clear going forward that a part of him is looking to belong and
that in a sense the fact this will earn him the loathing from his siblings is
something that he considers a bonus.
Both Sally and Lewyn go to
Cornell, their father’s alma mater, to which he ensured their attendance after
a generous donation of paintings. From the moment Sally arrives in her dorm,
she has decided that she wants to be alone and that means fundamentally
disowning the brother who lives on the same campus.
However the only person she
makes any effort to become friends with is her roommate Rochelle and she spends
so much time around her that Rochelle begins to avoid her, something she can
not understand even when it comes to herself.
Unable to find a major she likes she ends up drifting until she finds an
elderly women who is an appreciator of antique furniture. Sally spends much of her time at Cornell with
this woman, gathering furniture and just as often cleaning other’s people’s
houses.
Lewyn is the only Oppenheimer
who seems to be something resembling functional. He makes an effort to connect
with Sally throughout their first semester, something she keeps avoiding. He
makes a connection through his roommate who he learns is a Mormon. None of the Oppenheimer’s are anything other
than the most reformed of Jews and it leads to Lewyn seriously considering
religion for the first time, which leads to a disastrous campus Seder.
In the midst of this he meets
Rochelle and is shocked to learn from her that Sally has not told him of his
existence. He is so shocked by this and so smitten by Rochelle his first
instinct is to lie and then the lie keeps building. While this goes on Lewyn
becomes obsessed with the Book of Mormon and pays a visit to a Mormon Pageant
(there’s a famous Mormon site not far from Ithaca) which his very Jewish
roommates do not approve of it but he is enchanted by.
All three Oppenheimer’s are so
devoted by their new loves that they spend the summer vacations not going
home. However, their collective birthday
is at the end of the summer and none of them can avoid it. At the worst possible
time Sally learns of Rochelle’s relationship with Lewyn and responds to it in a
way she can not explain to herself but in a sense Rochelle can. This leads to
the climax of the second part, at a disastrous birthday celebration that leads
to what seems to be the permanent estrangement of the Oppenheimer clan.
It is here I must tell you that
the triplets were born on September 10th, that this climatic
birthday takes place on September 10th 2001, and that Salo is on one
of the planes that ends up crashing involved in 9/11. Some might consider this exploitive
but it is a deliberate choice by Korelitz. She does not mention the actual event,
only referring to Salo’s death in the final sentence of Part 2. What is more
important is what it means to the third Oppenheimer child, Phoebe, who narrates
the third and last part of the story and who we eventually realize has been
telling the entire saga which takes place when she is sixteen.
Because Phoebe was barely one at
the time and because her family has never talked since, Phoebe has lived her
entire childhood aware of any of the conflicts that led her family’s estrangements.
She honestly believes that the family was happy before this and the trauma of
Salo’s death in such a way has led to this permanent dissolution. She does not
even know the circumstances of her birth as Joanna has never told her. It is
only at the beginning of the novel when she opens a letter she didn’t mean too
and hears a conversation she definitely should have that she begins to put the
pieces together – and in the final act starts putting her family back together
as well.
How she does I will leave for
the reader to find out but it involves the kind of discussion that should have
taken place long ago and every member of the Oppenheimer family putting
together the pieces that a normal family would have learned had they simply
been the kind of family who could talk about anything.
Considering the pain that is at
the heart of so much of the novel, The Latecomer is frequently, often
hysterically, funny. Much of it is the kind of cringe comedy we see so much of
these days, but a lot of it comes from Korelitz’s decision to hold so much of
our society up to a very public lens. The conservative causes that Harrison tends
to embrace – and yes, he becomes a Fox news contributor at one point – almost seem
like a natural progression when you get a sample of some of the things that
happen at Walden. At one point Harrison
tells a story about an incident at Walden so utterly ridiculous at liberal sensitivities
that it seems genuinely lifted from any single college campus across the
country. The novel also takes a very
dark look at both the ideas of how the Oppenheimer siblings feel free to resent
Harrison conservative causes even though they are themselves the poster
children for white privilege. We also see
a certain level of judgment at every point: when Lewyn tells Phoebe of his
spiritual journey and tries to explain, it’s clear that Phoebe in her heart
finds it ridiculous, even though it led Lewyn to the path he chose. There is also a saga about race in America
which leads to the greatest punchline in the novel – and which Korelitz goes to
great detail to show that both liberal and conservative media completely miss
the point of it.
The Latecomer is one of the most brilliant
books I’ve read that could be described simply as mainstream. It does deserve
the comparison to Irving particularly because of a phrase that Phoebe learns that
she is both eighteen years younger than her siblings and simultaneously the
exact same age: a quirk I think Irving would be proud of. But this novels ends
with healing and happiness in a way Irving never gives us and honestly that few
of Korelitz’s novels do as well. And
there is something optimistic in the way that the most intractable of the Oppenheimer
children finds a way to break through even his long held views with someone
that would seem to anyone else like the least likely possible candidate. You
end it feeling not only hope for the Oppenheimer family, but in a weird way for
America as a whole.
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