REASONABLE PEOPLE

Novelist and playwright Kasten, author of A Little Something for Everyone (2020),recounts her idyllic childhood and college career.

The author writes this remembrance in the third person, calling herself Annie Lang and changing other people’s names. As the book opens in 1950, the Langs have moved to an Iowa college town where Annie’s dad now works as a business manager at a university. Their three-story house and oversized backyard are full of natural and human-made wonders. Her parents are kind to each other and to their kids and never argue. They answer all questions posed to them, even embarrassing ones, in a matter-of-fact way. By virtue of being near the university, Annie immerses herself in a cultural wonderland and gets the lead roles in several plays at the institution. Years pass, and the young, self-styled intellectual enrolls at the small Carroll College, the “Harvard of the Midwest.” There, and in a study-abroad program in London,she grows as a writer and thinker and meets a lanky physics major who also likes classical music and the work of comedians Mike Nichols and Elaine May. As their relationship blossoms, the self-aware Annie wrestles with questions of sex, marriage, and morality. Kasten’s charming memoir, written in a series of engaging vignettes, effectively focuses on those moments, big and small, that mold a person into who they truly are. Her talent for succinct description is impressive throughout, as when she tells of loving a recording of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, which inspired her to leap around her living room, “ending her performance by sinking like a fallen soufflé in the middle of the living room rug. She does not require an audience.” She similarly sketches other figures in her life in vivid, generous detail. Annie’s introspection carries the story as she debates rapidly evolving 1950s and ’60s norms and develops a greater sense of self. The work could have rallied a bit more enthusiasm toward its conclusion, but the overall richness of the account makes for gratifying reading.

A sophisticated and thought-provoking story of the emergence of a young writer.