AT LAST

Three generations of women are tied by blood, marriage, and a slow-burn disappointment in life.

A kind of existential crisis simmers in each of these 12 chapters—which could be read individually as short stories—traversing nearly a century of American life. The book begins in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1971 with Helene Simonauer and Evelyn Turner, uncomfortable in-laws-to-be, at the marriage of their children Tom and Ruth. Their silent ride to the flower shop for the wedding bouquet sets the tone for decades of a relationship based on competition and mutual disapproval. Flashes of their girlhoods, affluent and tragic for Helene, hardscrabble and transgressive for Evelyn, offer a backstory to their middle-aged unhappiness: “They are widows who lie in bed terrified that they are lost in their noisy days and their noisy, pointless lives and that they are missing everything that matters.” Ruth and Tom’s only child, Francie, brings some flashes of joy, but Francie is troubled by anxiety, which progresses to drug addiction. Much of the sadness of the novel comes from the characters’ inability to access their own selves—Helene and Evelyn seem trapped in performing a womanhood they have no interest in, and then the pain of such strangled identities is passed on through the generations in the form of perpetual criticism to the querulous and underachieving Ruth and painfully self-conscious Francie. There are some arresting vignettes: Evelyn develops a friendship with a neighbor’s child, who steals small, inconsequential things from her apartment; Helene attends a self-help class but is so discomfited at sharing in the circle that she invents a more interesting self to present. The novel ends with Francie approaching middle age, and finally happy—a triumph for all of the women before her.

Masterful portraits of women’s lives, only half lived.