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Summary
Summary
A haunting, enigmatic novel about a woman who is given a second chance--and isn't sure whether she really wants it
* A Publishers Weekly "Indie Sleeper" * A Powell's Indiespensable Pick * The Nervous Breakdown's October Book Club Pick *
Elisa Brown is driving back from her annual, somber visit to her son Silas's grave when something changes. Actually, everything changes: her body is more voluptuous; she's wearing different clothes and driving a new car. When she arrives home, her life is familiar--but different. There is her house, her husband. But in the world she now inhabits, Silas is no longer dead, and his brother is disturbingly changed. Elisa has a new job, and her marriage seems sturdier, and stranger, than she remembers. She finds herself faking her way through a life she is convinced is not her own. Has she had a psychotic break? Or has she entered a parallel universe? Elisa believed that Silas was doomed from the start, but now that he is alive, what can she do to repair her strained relations with her children? She soon discovers that these questions hinge on being able to see herself as she really is--something that might be impossible for Elisa, or for anyone. In Familiar, J. Robert Lennon continues his profound and exhilarating exploration of the surreal undercurrents of contemporary American life.
Author Notes
J. Robert Lennon is the author of "The Light of Falling Stars" & "The Funnies". He lives with his wife & children in Ithaca, NY.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A woman falls into an alternate version of her life but fails to convince anyone that her life was ever different in this stealthy and thought-provoking literary thriller. While on her annual pilgrimage to Wisconsin to visit her son Silas's grave, Elisa Brown discovers, in a blink, that she's wearing unfamiliar clothes and driving an unfamiliar car en route to an academic conference, where she is known as the graduate studies coordinator for a biotech center at an upstate New York university. It seems she's exchanged her lab job for a less intellectual role; her "habitual, practical, inert" union with Derek is now a loving relationship (due to counseling, it turns out). And Silas did not die in a car accident, but he and his brother, Sam, are estranged from their parents and living in California, for reasons Derek won't discuss. With no one to confide in about her growing sense of alienation and unease, Elisa seeks out specialists in alternate universes in her old field while going through the motions of her new routine. Lennon (Castle) succeeds by setting his odd, uncommon narrative in intimate terms that delve into Elisa's sense of confusion. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Oct. 2) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Returning from her annual pilgrimage to her son Silas' grave, Elisa Brown is suddenly struck by a sense that things have changed. The car she is driving isn't hers, her body has transformed, and in the seat next to her sits a conference binder addressed to a Lisa Brown. The old Elisa's son died at age 15; she was having an extramarital affair; and she was very close to her living son, Sam. This new Lisa is estranged from both of her children and lives in quiet tension with her husband in a home devoid of life. As the old Elisa tries to parse out what has happened to her, she discovers that her new reality is as sad and complicated as her previous life, and she begins to feel trapped between both worlds. Readers who enjoyed Lennon's previous novel Castle (2009) will see some common themes here, as Elisa questions her own understanding of reality and memory and tries to unravel the emotional mystery that surrounds both of her lives.--Paulson, Heather Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IT runs deep in life, the feeling that we have wandered down some corridor just alongside the one where we truly belong. An inattentive step or two and already we have traveled too far. The door has disappeared. Our place in the world has become irrecoverable. The past half-decade of American letters has seen the translation or publication of a little pack of kindred novels intended to reproduce this sensation, nearly all of them fascinating. Call it the literature of the ontological wrong turn. Some of its representatives have been issued to great gales of attention, like "1Q84," by Haruki Murakami, or "Remainder," by Tom McCarthy, others to the keen enthusiasm of a few lucky explorers, like "Metropole," by Ferenc Karinthy, or (by my lights the secret masterpiece of the field) "The Other City," by Michal Ajvaz. To that beguiling list add J. Robert Lennon's allusive and mysterious new novel, "Familiar," his ninth book and one of his finest. "All of this is impossible, we're doing impossible things," Lennon writes. "People do impossible things, all day long." For Elisa Macalaster Brown, returning to New York after a visit to Wisconsin, the world reveals its impossibility on a dull stretch of Interstate 90 when the crack in her windshield, by which she likes to align her car with the roadside, instantaneously vanishes. All at once she is carrying a different phone, wearing different clothes. The clouds have multiplied in the sky. She is still herself, or some version of herself, but what that means is no longer certain. Only gradually does her life disclose the full range of its differences to her. Some of those differences are mundane or amusing: the moment the change takes place, her mouth fills with the taste of mint from the gum she is suddenly chewing, and while she used to find politics meaningless, now she is known for her Sarah Palin obsession. Some pose a predicament: she has a job whose responsibilities she is not sure how to fulfill, a therapist she has never met and a best friend to whom she has never spoken. And some wrench her so far outside the history she recollects that she can barely accommodate herself to them: her son Silas, who died in a car accident, is alive, while her other son, Sam, has become alienated from her; the lover she once took now greets her as a stranger; and her marriage has become sweet, loving, "cheerful, cheerful, cheerful," rather than the "habitual, practical, inert" exercise it used to be. "To pick up the phone and find that love is gone, that's something a person can understand," she reflects. "To pick up the phone and find that love is here, where it doesn't belong: well." What happened? she wonders, and so do we, and while the novel produces a whole flock of theories, not one of them colors its pages for longer than a moment before it darts out of sight. Has fate offered Elisa the chance to shoulder her life onto a new path? Is she meant to correct the decisions she remembers making or to affirm them? Has she entered an actual parallel reality, or is the life she recalls entirely false, the result of an "imagination broken by guilt and grief"? Has her new life been her real one all along? Where does the glitch finally lie: in her mind or in the universe? Is there another Elisa, with whom she has traded places, and if so what has become of her? Or is Elisa herself merely a copy, duplicated and dislocated from the original, that lonely wife and grieving mother still out there enduring her days somewhere? Is there a reason for her transformation, an intelligence behind it? Can she ever find her way back home? Life is like a long fall from a tremendous height; or no - like a condemned house collapsing abruptly into the earth; or no - like a cell undergoing mitosis, "straining to separate . . . pushing at the edges of its tiny world"; or no - like an ornate video game ("INSTRUCTIONS: FIND YOURSELF"), the maneuvers it permits abundant but not limitless; or no - like the static on a TV screen, "a mesmerizing and random and utterly boring thing," Elisa thinks, "that nevertheless compelled and frightened her." The book doesn't forbid any of these possibilities, but it doesn't insist upon any of them, either. Instead, it offers readers a swerving existential mystery of the sort that Dennis Potter used to champion: all clues, no solutions. (Lennon's recent collection "Pieces for the Left Hand," with its hundred alluringly peculiar little stories, is all clues, too, but with one important difference: Each story is a clue by itself, sequestered from every other, and each seems to answer some tiny unspoken mystery of its own.) Elisa might feel that her experience has passed beyond her understanding, but even the most conventional life occasionally presents the same feeling. Turn your head a bare inch to the left and you'll catch a glimpse of something you can't explain, something strange shimmering beneath the dirt and asphalt of the ordinary. The book reflects this sensation down to its very title, "Familiar," a word that indicates the normal, of course, the commonplace, but also the supernatural, the witchy. Late in the narrative, when Elisa "starts painting diptychs: nearly identical panels, save for slight differences," the moment seems to volunteer an insight. I paused when it occurred to me that the novel had been displaying this same property all along, that it was a kind of diptych encouraging us to take its incidents and adopt two different perspectives toward them simultaneously, asking us to see, right alongside each other, the story of a woman who journeys between realities and a woman who takes leave of her senses, a woman who loses a child to death and a woman who loses both children to estrangement, without allowing either perception to blur. Lennon's sentences are often diptychs, as well, exhibiting some image or incident twice, with only a small modification of effect. "To Elisa this seems disruptive, drastic: isn't there a kind of hush in the room just now, a suspension of movement and sound?" "The therapist is not looking at Derek, but at her, gazing at her with a strange intensity, as though for the first time, as though she's naked." "She realized that she had moved on, that her life had been restored to her. And then the thing that happened happened." All of which is to say that this novel, like every other, is a novel of patterns. What makes it greater than that is the insight it displays - sometimes moving, sometimes horrific - into the mind of a woman who requires the machinery of science fiction in order to realize she has failed her children and her life is incommunicable, who does not begin to see herself clearly until the entire universe has altered itself to repair her windshield, who wonders if maybe, after all, the world isn't better with a crack in it. Has Lennon's heroine entered an actual parallel reality, or has her new life been her real one all along? Kevin Brockmeier's most recent novel, "The Illumination," is now available in paperback.
Guardian Review
"You may find yourself in another part of the world/ You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile . . . You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?" The lyrics for "Once in a Lifetime", Talking Heads' small masterpiece of dissociation, could serve as an epigraph for Familiar, the latest of American author J Robert Lennon's cunning, heartfelt fictions. As the book opens, Elisa has been visiting the grave of her malevolent, unfathomable son Silas, who died in a car accident when he was 15 after making the lives of his parents and older brother, Sam, a misery. She is driving home when it happens. A crack in the windscreen that has been there for years vanishes; she realises that her car is a different make; there is gum in her mouth. "She pushes it out with her tongue and it falls into her lap." What can she do but drive on? Back home, she finds her house slightly altered, her husband Derek's expectations of her rather different from before, and her favourite nightshirt forgotten at the back of the closet. Most unnerving of all, she has two sons again: on the wall is an impossible photograph of Silas in his late teenage years. Her lost child has been returned to her, and yet some tragedy endures; chillingly, Derek is outraged at any mention of the boys, just as he is outraged and baffled by the changes in Elisa. What kind of story is this? It could, as Elisa ponders, be science fiction: "Someone was doing an experiment, and the fabric of space and time was torn. She is the unwitting victim of a top-secret military project . . . " Or a psychological thriller, in the vein of Memento or Before I Go to Sleep: "The heroine has amnesia. That's a real phenomenon, not just a movie trope." Elisa and Lennon explore both possibilities, but the novel delicately skirts all the boundaries of genre. The strand in which Elisa tries to apply theoretical science to her situation is mind-expanding and poignantly funny. "You would need to smash the right particles together," a physicist with a penchant for parallel worlds tells her, when she asks how to make a new universe. She also tells Elisa that the idea of the multiverse has its roots, not in wormholes and warp speeds, but in ideas about free will and individual agency: "What you do means something. It makes something happen." Smashing particles together - that's one definition of family life. As the novel progresses, it becomes not only an intriguingly original existential mystery but a nuanced portrait of grief and parenthood, marriage and intimacy, and the boundaries erected to protect and defend the self. Silas's personality has always been so overwhelming that as a family, "they lived in the world he made, by necessity, and he refused to enter the world they wanted him to live in". Even in death, he dominated the house. In this new reality, he designs video games that reject any notion of storyline or meaning: all the gamer really wants, he says, is, "to watch things die and be born. To make worlds with your hands". Yet when Elisa starts to play these games, she cannot help but find meaning there; and as she reinterprets her past in the light of a new present, she wonders if the story she has always told herself about Silas is the true one. "How do you prepare for the unknown?" Elisa asks as she drives towards a life she doesn't recognise. But this is a question that should be pressing on us all, every second of every day; while her feelings of being adrift in a strange world are familiar - as the title suggests - to every reader. Lennon ties this emotion particularly to parenthood ("There was no way to know what actions had which results, whether all of it was her fault, or none of it"), but it becomes only more acute with the passing of time. It's a dazzling trick of fiction, to animate the most open-ended of philosophical questions with such urgency that the reader believes there is an answer to race towards. Understated, shocking, odd and yet so very familiar, Familiar addresses the themes that resound through "the strange, enormous, echo-filled room[s]" of our lives. To order Familiar for pounds 9.59 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. - Justine Jordan What kind of story is this? It could, as Elisa ponders, be science fiction: "Someone was doing an experiment, and the fabric of space and time was torn. She is the unwitting victim of a top-secret military project . . . " Or a psychological thriller, in the vein of Memento or Before I Go to Sleep: "The heroine has amnesia. That's a real phenomenon, not just a movie trope." Elisa and [J Robert Lennon] explore both possibilities, but the novel delicately skirts all the boundaries of genre. The strand in which Elisa tries to apply theoretical science to her situation is mind-expanding and poignantly funny. "You would need to smash the right particles together," a physicist with a penchant for parallel worlds tells her, when she asks how to make a new universe. She also tells Elisa that the idea of the multiverse has its roots, not in wormholes and warp speeds, but in ideas about free will and individual agency: "What you do means something. It makes something happen." - Justine Jordan
Kirkus Review
Lennon's (Castle, 2009, etc.) latest literary effort chronicles Elisa Macalaster Brown's life as it quantum-shifts into a parallel universe. At some random midtrip interval, with Elisa wending her way homeward from her annual pilgrimage to the grave of her son, Silas, dead in an auto accident at age 15, she morphs into a different version of the same person. No longer a spare, contained woman in cutoff jeans driving her familiar Honda Accord, Elisa becomes more voluptuous, more properly dressed, apparently in midtrip in a new car on her way home from a professional conference. And Silas isn't dead, which she'll soon learn. But there is this: All that has been a barrier to peace and contentment remains. She is still the mother who "has created a family of miserable loners who seem incapable of helping one another." Silas' death had forced Elisa to confront love in all its forms and contours, but now she faces a world where all seems nearly identical, except that Silas and his brother, Sam, are grown men estranged from their parents. The book unfolds slowly in first person, present tense, providing the deepening intimacy necessary to examine how Elisa comes to believe she has shifted to an alternate universe. And as the story develops in her new world within her new self, the new Elisa grows "increasingly frightened ... by the possibility that she might now be sent back against her will, in an instant, the same way she got here." While Silas' every action reveals him as near sociopathic, it is Derek, Elisa's husband, who best serves as both foil and catalyst. Approaching the complex internal story without postmodern irony, Lennon has a gift for stretching the borders of character. A surrealistic tale about the enigma to be found in second chances.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In the remarkable opening of this latest novel from Lennon (Castle), Elisa Brown is driving home from a visit to her son Silas's grave when suddenly everything changes. Her clothes are different, and she arrives home to a life that's familiar but dramatically altered. Same husband, same children-suddenly, Silas is alive-but everything is different, including herself. She even has a new job and finds her marriage both happier and stranger than she remembered. So Elisa goes about fending her way through a life she is certain is not her real one. If she is living this life, who is living her other one? Why and how has this happened to her? Has she had a psychotic break, or are there parallel worlds? Whether she wants to or not, Elisa must push the limits of the known to follow a path like a Mobius strip where little is as it seems and every move challenges the previous and the subsequent ones. VERDICT Stunning, convoluted, and compelling, this thoroughly mesmerizing work is recommended for discerning readers who savor an unusual story brilliantly presented.-Joyce Townsend, Pittsburg, CA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
