CITY OF LAUGHTER

A multigenerational saga about Jewish women contending with family secrets.

Part family saga, part queer coming-of-age campus novel, part phantasmagoria, Fruchter’s debut novel certainly resists easy categorization. Not long after her father dies, and inspired by the scraps of stories she’s inherited from her mother, Shiva Margolin decides to go to grad school to study folktales. Her mother, Hannah, has spiraled into solitude as a result of her grief. The two aren’t getting along because Hannah refuses to tell Shiva anything at all about her own mother, Syl. “Being in the dark about her family’s story bothered [Shiva] more than it should,” Fruchter writes. “But something was jammed, something slowing her machinery, and she couldn’t shake the primary conviction that whatever it was, it was distinctly generational. That there was something in the family past so shadowy and elusive, it meant there were real ghosts here.” These chapters are interspersed with 1920s letters addressed to an unknown recipient by Syl’s mother, Mira, when Mira was still a young girl. Meanwhile, references to mysteriously androgynous figures—messengers of some kind—begin to crop up. This is a lot for one novel to contain, and Fruchter doesn’t always manage it. Her prose often has a self-conscious quality that occasionally leads to awkward phrasings (“there exists a kind of genetics of wanting,” for example), and passages that are meant to be narrated by characters living in the past frequently sound unconvincing. There is a great deal of urgency in this novel—loneliness, desire, and yearning, above all—but by the end, that urgency has begun to feel not only overwrought but unearned.

In its frantic attempts to be many things, this novel ends up master of none.