Review:
The stories in this collection are so linked and consistent, the book is almost a novel. It tells the comic and endearing history of a family of archetypal American Jews. Rose, the finicky and irrational Jewish mother, becomes increasingly dependent on Percodan and on her two sons, Ed, a hard-headed academic, and Henry, an arty dilettante. Ed's writer wife Sara suffers through teaching creative writing at the local Jewish Community Center. Ed painfully endures an interfaith weekend with crushingly banal Christian ecumenists, even though both he and Sara are completely irreligious. Meanwhile their daughter Miriam alarms them by rediscovering Judaism. Goodman, whose stories appear regularly in the New Yorker, delights the reader with recognition of the funny in the familiar.
About the Author:
Allegra Goodman's first collection, Total Immersion, was published in 1989. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and Commentary, and has been selected for Prize Stories 1995, The 0. Henry Awards, and other anthologies. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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