The Middlesteins: A Novel
Jami Attenberg
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 1455507202
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
For more than thirty years, Edie and Richard Middlestein shared a solid family life together in the suburbs of Chicago. But now things are splintering apart, for one reason, it seems: Edie's enormous girth. She's obsessed with food--thinking about it, eating it--and if she doesn't stop, she won't have much longer to live.
When Richard abandons his wife, it is up to the next generation to take control. Robin, their schoolteacher daughter, is determined that her father pay for leaving Edie. Benny, an easy-going, pot-smoking family man, just wants to smooth things over. And Rachelle-- a whippet thin perfectionist-- is intent on saving her mother-in-law's life, but this task proves even bigger than planning her twin children's spectacular b'nai mitzvah party. Through it all, they wonder: do Edie's devastating choices rest on her shoulders alone, or are others at fault, too?
With pitch-perfect prose, huge compassion, and sly humor, Jami Attenberg has given us an epic story of marriage, family, and obsession. The Middlesteins explores the hopes and heartbreaks of new and old love, the yearnings of Midwestern America, and our devastating, fascinating preoccupation with food.
curly-haired woman, ample, smiling, appearing much younger than sixty, so familiar-looking that he was immediately attracted to her simply because he found familiarity, rare these days, so comforting. He opened her ad and realized he was staring at a picture of his wife, Edie, from ten years earlier, before they had fallen out of love with each other, before they had drifted so far apart it was as if they were on opposite ends of the world. He knew when that photo was taken: It was on their trip
together around the high-school track, Edie huffing and limping, though suffering silently otherwise, unwilling to admit that this was totally abnormal, that she and her daughter had never in their lives gone for a mile-long walk together, let alone on the high-school track, but if they admitted how weird it was, then they would have to admit everything else about her health, and neither one of them wanted to talk about that, because they were both completely terrified for different reasons, and
substance about her life, maybe a story here and there about her work as a history teacher at a high-priced private school. The kids made her laugh. Her mother had to drag out the tiniest detail. Edie never knew when she was going to get a new piece of information, and when she did, she savored it for weeks, fleshing out her daughter’s life in her head. But what reason would Robin have to trust her with her heart? Even if Edie was sharing her own heart with her now. No, not sharing. That was too
of Law & Order or a class in college or an orientation program had prepared her for how much one year teaching in a school full of at-risk kids was going to suck. If she was seeking hope and inspiration, or if she was thinking she was going to provide it, she was in the wrong place. She was way out of her league. Everyone knew it. She had no poker face. All day long she flinched. She would wake up every morning and wonder if she was doing more harm than good. She spent money out of her own
Edie, sprawled on the floor in her shimmering purple dress, one hand outstretched, the other frozen near her chest, as if she had clutched at it, and then given up on it. Her lips were blue. This was not right. This was the wrong information. He knelt beside her and put a hand on her face, and the cool skin rippled beneath his fingers. He grasped desperately for another poem he had memorized once, the exact lines of which eluded him. It had something to do with an icebox and plums and being