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Summary
Summary
The follow-up to her highly praised debut story collection, The First Hurt , Rachel Sherman's Living Room is a beautiful and disarmingly direct portrait of a family in trouble. With the tone of a modern-day Jewish The Ice Storm set in Long Island, imbued with Alice Munro's fascination with personal history, Living Room is a deep exploration of the ripple effects of mental illness on a family, as well as a look at generational differences in mating and marriage, and a wry, wise look at suburban angst.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Sherman's riveting debut novel (after the collection The First Hurt) examines the dreams and disappointments of teenager Abby; her mother, Livia; and Abby's grandmother, twice-widowed Headie. Each of the women harbors a secret none of the others suspect: Abby drowns her crippling insecurity in alcohol; Livia has an eating disorder; and Headie's encroaching senility obscures a secret about her son, Jeffrey. Each, caught up in her own secret, neglects to notice the damage her preoccupation causes others. Vividly drawn secondary characters expand the story's breadth-Abby's bad-news friend Jenna; Jorgen, a Swedish au pair whose bad judgment nearly kills Abby; Simone, a lesbian psychiatrist Livia is attracted to for reasons she isn't quite sure of; and Jeffrey, who acts as a narrative linchpin. Unsentimental yet deeply felt, this tale examines what bubbles under the surface of a supposedly happy Long Island family. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
To awkward 15-year-old Abby Schecter, the "living room" - that is, the area where she spends the most time experiencing memorable things - is an assemblage of tables and a couch beneath a canopy of trees behind her high school, where rebellious adolescents sneak smokes or bask in the reflection of cooler, more popular kids. To her mother, Livia, the living room is anywhere she can secretly binge on food away from the judgment of observers, most notably her husband, Jeffrey, a lawyer whose chief emotion toward her is "worry." And to Jeffrey's increasingly senile mother, Headie, the living room is the floor of her apartment, where she willingly spends most of her days reminiscing about her two dead husbands. "Headie began crawling a few weeks earlier. It suddenly occurred to her when she was down on the floor trying to pick up a piece of lint. Why get up only to sit back down? She wondered why she had never thought of this before." With perfect pacing, Sherman rotates the action among Abby, her mother and her grandmother, emphasizing the loneliness and secrecy that pervades three generations of women, as well as the fear that a revelation of secrets will make their spaces more cramped and uncomfortable, less suitable for living. Cameron Martin is a columnist at ESPN.com.
