FATHERLAND

A coming-of-age story in a world dominated by the choices of men.

“The shoes were packed. ‘Daddy loves you,’” Josie’s father tells her, “glancing around—had he left anything?” Martin Brier is halfway out the door, first wife cast aside for the younger model destined to become his second. Shorr’s latest novel is a mid-20th-century, Midwestern, nearly father-free coming-of-age story that follows Josie, her two brothers, and their mother as they try to build a life for themselves in Martin’s cavernous absence. Shorr favors a close third-person point of view which hovers, hummingbird-style, outside her characters’ windows. It’s an effective strategy, especially in Shorr’s fluidly engaging prose style, which allows readers to access the thoughts of even the most difficult characters—Martin included. He shows us in the passage above, for instance, that he can’t focus on his daughter long enough to tell her he loves her without simultaneously wondering if he’s adequately packed his belongings. His selfishness is astounding. So is the psychological astuteness with which Shorr has loaded the sentence—and the rest of the book—which is, in the end, the portrait of a girl and her wider family as they adjust to a world whose parameters they have not set themselves. Shorr picks up the narrative in the mid-’50s and sets it down half a century later, when Cleveland has changed irrevocably and Josie’s family has scattered. If the book putters out in the last two or three chapters, that seems a small price to pay. The larger missed opportunity is that Lora, Josie’s mother, doesn’t seem fully rendered. As a momentarily penniless single mother of three, she has to act decisively—and does. Still, Shorr has cast her sights elsewhere, and the result is a remarkable success.

A beautifully written portrait of a girl and her family.