Affectionate Chaos

There’s a lot going on in Strangers and Cousins. There are family dynamics: Bennie and Walter, parents of four children ranging in age from 5 to 22, are preparing for the wedding of their oldest, Clem(entine), who is marrying her college sweetheart. (This will be an interracial, same-sex marriage, accepted without concern by family and friends.) It is five days before the wedding of Clem and Diggs and all the attendant chaos of an offbeat wedding with an unknown number of college-age guests who will simply turn up, pitch their tents in the yard, and participate. Bennie and Walter’s 100-year-old house is falling apart and they cannot afford to renovate it. Great-aunt Glad(ys) is dying.

Socio-cultural neighbourhood issues: Ultra-orthodox Jews (Haredi) are moving into the neighbourhood and want to take it over; eventually they stores will be pressured to close on Saturdays and schools will be converted to yeshivas. Should Bennie and Walter sell?

Reflective history: There is the parallel tale of Aunt Glad’s childhood in this same town, where a fire killed eighteen children and traumatized the town. A ‘strange’, solitary, East European Jewish man was blamed for the accident and driven out of town, because the town wanted a scapegoat.

Bennie has just discovered that at the age of 45, she is pregnant again. Her youngest, Pim, age 5, likes to run around naked and play imaginary martial games. The next up, (Sa)Mantha, has a broken arm and is precociously argumentative for an 8 year old. Tom, 18, is discovering his good looks and is often consciously shirtless. Bennie’s brother Lloyd and his half-Nicaraguan nine-year-old daughter Ellerby are coming for the wedding, but not the wife who abandoned Lloyd and Ellerby.

And yet, somehow, Leah Hager Cohen manages to weave all these disparate threads into an interesting, mostly coherent novel.

The chaos of family life, especially with a large argumentative family, each child with their own issues, is charmingly depicted and the warm affection between and from the parents is evident throughout. Even if Bennie is perpetually irritable for no apparent reason.

“Where’s your brother?’ she demands of Mantha. ‘What are you looking for?”
“A plum that isn’t squishy.”
“Well stop that. Just take one. You’re making them all squishy. Where’s your brother? […] Wash it first. […]
Samantha Rachel Erland Blumenthal. I’m not going to ask you a third —-” [..]
“Don’t hang on me, Mantha.”

For a character who is calmly tolerant and liberally accepting about the larger things (the interracial, same-sex marriage, the relative youth (22!) of the brides, societal changes) and whose own marriage was a simple spur-of-the-moment courthouse event, Bennie seems surprisingly testy and fussy about the small stuff. Her inner monologue occasionally sounds like an uptight rigid society matron.

It’s all very well for Clem to declare that she and her friends are in charge of everything, Mom, you won’t have to worry about a thing! They’re too inexperienced to understand all the backstage work involved in hosting a wedding. They wouldn’t know to think about things like do they have enough seating for all the older people, and who’s going to clean the bathrooms and make sure there are fresh hand towels. And although they’ve promised they have all the food under control what could that mean really? Have they any idea about things like quantities? And food poisoning? How to keep cold things cold and hot things hot? Have they given thought to coolers and chafing dishes, ice … –

The impending Ultra-Orthodox invasion brings in some interesting viewpoints, and offers obvious parallels to Other people moving into established white communities.

Jeff Greenberg has been sending him links to articles detailing all the myriad problems faced by towns where Haredim live in large numbers. […] Story after story describing how lawyers specializing in religious loopholes help the Haredim drain secular coffers while spurning secular society.

Some chapters are spent on the relatively uninteresting Clem and her considerably more mature girlfriend Diggs, and Clem’s slow realization of her own white privilege, but even that is annoyingly self-absorbed.

I’ve thought of that moment — the moment I understood how much I didn’t understand, how much I would never understand, and how I therefore, from that moment on, would always be responsible for trying — I think of it, it’s funny, but I’ve always thought of it as the moment I in a way became an adult, or no, became a person really, a really and truly full human being.

Most entertaining is Pim, the energetic five year old. His poetry slam with Aunt Glad is charming, and he is thoroughly, consistently, himself.

As if all the human concerns were not enough, there are also intermittent updates about the local mice.

This particular mouse (now, after only three years on earth, in her dotage) first became a mother at twelve weeks of age. She has fulfilled her evolutionary purpose by giving birth to more than three hundred children. […] This is the final night of her life. She will expire of natural causes by morning.

I enjoyed the mouse tales, but were they supposed to be a reflection of the human stories, or a metaphor, or a symbol, or an analogy to something? You got me.

The setting is quite lovely: the house that used to be a one-room store and post-office, still with mailboxes installed into a wall. And Cohen’s descriptions can be captivating:

“the great glacier of detritus that has been consigned to the barn over decades”
“the air, storied with molecules of ancient hay and manure”
“All three Digginses comported themselves with an elegant economy of motion, a kind of kinesthetic self-control.”
“gold pollen stains patterning the asphalt wher the rain ran in rivulets overnight”

The end is foreshadowed over and over, in a slightly heavy-handed way.