In Case We're Separated: Connected Stories (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
How the heck did this book get a 4 rating, not to mention "A Notable Book of the Year, The New York Times Book Review", it was awful and boring! When I read the back of the book in the store, I thought yeah, this sounds great, but it was far from it. It's about a family of Jewish immigrants that span over generations, except it didn't flow nicely. I couldn't connect with any one character as a result. It went back and forth with different generations and it was random stories picked out from their lives, which were, well, boring! The thirteen stories each shared repeated topics or tropes in something like the way of a sestina. Each chapter shared a glass of water, a sharp point, a cord, a mouth, an exchange, and a map that may be wrong. Sounds interesting right? "Sounds" is the key word here, because it was right up there in the worst books I've ever read. I think this author could had made her story more interesting in using the stanzas if she just written about one family/one generation because 226 pages is not enough to make it many generations.
My favorite new writer of the last few years, I think--a very Paley-esque vision of Jewish lefty quirkiness. Either her or Steve Stern, who works in Singer territories of Jewish folklore and sex, but in Memphis, which actually did have kind of an impressive Jewish heritage, I learned when visiting. (At least for the South.) This is a double sestina of stories (the same elements are recycled in different forms in each story, in the order prescribed--I was not smart enough or educated enough to notice this, but a helpful afterword points this out) about another Jewish family's entanglements over the course of a half-century, with a similarly wry acceptance of the way things sometimes work out.
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