HYSTERIA

A young woman tries to find her footing in this trippy and hypnotic debut.

The unnamed millennial narrator in Gross’ novel is in trouble: She can’t move away from the large shadow her parents cast over her life. It doesn’t help that the parents might have played a key role in their daughter’s obtaining a teaching job at the very school she once attended. Worse, the protagonist lives in Brooklyn, not far enough away to escape her parents’ orbit, an apartment close to Central Park. She is addicted to sex, constantly moving from one encounter to another in a haze of alcohol and shame. Such damaging behavior seems to be just a cover for her many insecurities. “I wanted to throw myself on my mother, beg her to give me her blessing to leave, promise she would still love me,” the narrator says when she wants to leave a party and, more important, her parents’ smothering judgment. As luck would have it, she runs into a sympathetic local bartender who looks like Sigmund Freud’s double. With or without his help, there are plenty of personality quirks, including Oedipal issues, to take apart here. Gross expertly dissects the lasting damage a suffocating parent-child relationship can inflict. The narrator's constant anxiety—“I wanted to be flattened. I wanted to be small. I wanted my parents, I wanted to curl up in my mother’s closet alone. Only they understood me”—might be unsettling or even frustrating for some readers, but it is to Gross’ credit that her protagonist cuts a sympathetic and believable figure.

A riveting novel that won’t let you look away even as the narrator careens from one disaster to another.