MIDNIGHT SUPPERS

by Susan Monsky ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 25, 1982

A flickeringly uneven but often-tantalizing first novel about a young woman's groping for balance and selfhood as she reviews her childhood within an absurd but ""precious"" No Exit-style family circle: mother, father, mother's lover, and the spectral presences of a dead mother and child. Abe Fern comes in 1941 to Max and Esther Berenson's small Southern town, where he has ""no history, no business."" Yet Northerner Abe, like Max a pediatrician, is immediately ""adopted"" by the Berensons--as friend, as Max's partner, as Esther's WW II lover. So: does Max, overseas, know what's going on? Probably. But ""it's not in Max's nature to notice anything out loud."" Moreover, Max is haunted by the post-partum death of his first wife and the infant son he could not save; he feels that conception could be riddled with death; perhaps, then, Max has ""deeded"" Esther to Abe. And years later, with Max dying, daughter Rebecca will demand to know if Abe is her father--remembering her childhood views of Esther and Abe's love-making, the ""secret adult game,"" and other long-ago traumas: ""Bad Girl"" days at home and school; anti-Semitic taunts from neighborhood kids parroting prejudices; a Baptist revival service when God seemed to have been with Rebecca isolated in a pew. A promising photographer, in love and pregnant, the adult Rebecca sifts through these odd candids of memory. And finally, returning home, site crosses the threshhold she had always been ""poised outside""--bullying, forgiving, ultimately loving: Home has become a compassionate landscape, and at last she is ""all of a piece."" Monsky's symbolism here--like the familiar camera's-eye image of identity--seems too rushed and pat; and the characters are too dim for their subtle inter-relationships. Still, the novel's view of entwined lives effortlessly coiling above a hurtful reality has a lively and inventive buoyancy--almost enough to lift it above the more conventional, soggy first-novel stretches.

Pub Date: Jan. 25, 1982

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1982

Categories: FICTION