Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung
From critically acclaimed New York Times best-selling author Jami Attenberg comes a novel of family secrets: think the drama of Big Little Lies set in the heat of a New Orleans summer.
"If I know why they are the way they are, then maybe I can learn why I am the way I am," says Alex Tuchman of her parents. Now that her father, Victor, is on his deathbed, Alex--a strong-headed lawyer, devoted mother, and loving sister--feels she can finally unearth the secrets of who Victor is and what he did over the course of his life and career. (A power-hungry real estate developer, he is, by all accounts, a bad man.) She travels to New Orleans to be with her family, but mostly to interrogate her tight-lipped mother, Barbra.
As Barbra fends off Alex's unrelenting questions, she reflects on her tumultuous life with Victor. Meanwhile Gary, Alex's brother, is incommunicado, trying to get his movie career off the ground in Los Angeles. And Gary's wife, Twyla, is having a nervous breakdown, buying up all the lipstick in drugstores around New Orleans and bursting into crying fits. Dysfunction is at its peak. As family members grapple with Victor's history, they must figure out a way to move forward--with one another, for themselves, and for the sake of their children.
All This Could Be Yours is a timely, piercing exploration of what it means to be caught in the web of a toxic man who abused his power; it shows how those webs can entangle a family for generations, and what it takes to--maybe, hopefully--break free. With her signature "sparkling prose" (Marie Claire) and incisive wit, Jami Attenberg deftly explores one of the most important subjects of our age.
Rezensionen (5)
Publisher's Weekly-Rezension
A patriarch's death strains a family's already fraught relationships in this dazzling novel from Attenberg (All Grown Up). Shady real estate developer Victor Tuchman suffers a heart attack in New Orleans and is rushed to the hospital. During his final, lingering day, his family mentally rehashes key moments of his life in hopes of understanding the man they are losing. His wife, Barbra, still annoyed about leaving their Connecticut mansion, occupies herself with obsessive walking while remembering Victor's quick transition from shy suitor to abusive tyrant. His daughter, Alex, flies in from Chicago, desperate to know the truth about Victor's criminal past, and begrudges her mother's insistence she let it go and make peace. Victor's son Gary, who is in Los Angeles to jump-start his career in the movies, avoids answering calls from the family and intentionally misses his flight. Gary's wife, Twyla, slips into a nervous breakdown during a cosmetic shopping spree, slowly revealing the true root of her distress. As Victor fades, the family's dysfunction comes to light and they make drastic choices about their future. Attenberg excels at revealing rich interior lives--not only for her main cast, but also for cameo characters--in direct, lucid prose. This is a delectable family saga. (Sept.)
Guardian Review
"The only problem she had was men, who constantly bothered her": this might be the motto of Jami Attenberg's latest novel. The line is uttered by Twyla, the daughter-in-law of a dying misogynist gangster named Victor Tuchman. She's not alone in feeling this way about men in general, and Victor in particular. His wife, Barbra, and his daughter, Alex, have also gathered to see whether the man who made their lives miserable will die, and to figure out how much they really care. This story is about them. The bulk of the novel takes place over a single day, just after Victor has been for a heart attack. The setting is present-day New Orleans, where Victor and Barbra have moved after a long, mansion-bound life in Connecticut, ostensibly to be near their son, Gary, and his wife and daughter, Twyla and Avery. But Victor is a deceptive man, even to his children. He is also a bad man. Though we're never given the exact nature of his crimes, we learn that he was a New Jersey gangster, more or less of the Sopranos variety. He was also an abusive husband and father, a philanderer and a tyrant and likely a rapist. Whatever the details of his life, their implications have long been clear to Alex: "Her gut told her he should be in jail right now." It is the women around Victor - Barbra, Alex and Twyla - who must endure the hurricane of his life, who must try to love him, to make him happy, to cover up for him, and who are all upbraided and assaulted by him. Much like Attenberg's 2012 book The Middlesteins, this novel is uncompromising in its penetrating treatment of the ties that bind a family together. Attenberg weaves her narrative with a scintillating and often wry prose; her love for her characters, and her keen interest in their joys and longings, never fails to shine through. Often she sets scenes with the terseness of a screenplay, but periodically she plunges into rich description, as when Twyla, crying, looks in the mirror and notices "lips in distress, cracked at the edges, only half the color left behind, the other half disappeared, god knows where, absorbed into skin, into air, into grief". These tears are not just for Victor's victims. Alex must plead with her ex-husband, Bobby, not to expose their daughter to his compulsive lechery. Twyla has lived the bulk of her life trying not to wither beneath the male gaze, and now finds herself more distanced from Gary than ever. Barbra struggles to understand why she still loves her husband, after all this time. And all of them live under the shadow of another, casually destructive man: as Alex thinks every day, "our president [is] a moron and the world [is] falling apart". The varied experiences of these characters make it clear that the bad man is not an exception to the rule of manhood; he merely defines its borders. The novel is not only concerned with gender politics: it also frequently returns to questions of socioeconomic class. And yet, it is weaker on this topic. We get cursory moments of virtue-signalling, when the narrative pauses briefly on working people - a cashier, a waitress, a tram driver - to tell us about the second job they're forced to hold, or about how much they hate privileged tourists. The novel tells us about mass graves for the indigent, and gives us 30 pages with Sharon, a black woman only tangentially related to the plot, who lifts up her neighbourhood while suffering the effects of white gentrification. But none of these people is a protagonist, none of their lives is centred. The novel points to them, wants them to be recognised; but it refuses to perform that recognition itself. "Whatever we do tonight, let's not talk about politics," Alex says to a man she meets at a bar, just after an altercation with a homeless man on the street. Despite the book's signals to the contrary, this might be its other motto.
Kirkus-Rezension
After the brutish family patriarch has a heart attack, the surviving Tuchmans (mostly) gather at his deathbed, each of them struggling to make sense of their pastand come to terms with their present."He was an angry man, and he was an ugly man," the novel begins, "and he was tall, and he was pacing," and this is how we meet Victor Tuchman in the moments before he collapses. And so the family begins to assemble: Alex, his daughter, a newly divorced lawyer, arrives in New Orleans from the Chicago suburbs; his long-suffering wife, Barbra, tiny and stoic, is already there. His son, Gary, is very notably absent, but Gary's wife, Twylaa family outlier, Southern and blondeis in attendance, with her own family secrets. The novel takes place in one very long day but encompasses the entirety of lifetimes: Barbra's life before marrying Victor and the life they led after; Alex's unhappy Connecticut childhood and the growing gulf between her and her criminal fatherirreconcilable, even in death. It encompasses Gary's earnest attempt to build a stable family life, to escape his family through Twyla, and Twyla's own search for meaning. Even the background characters have stories: the EMS worker who wants to move in with his girlfriend who doesn't love him; the CVS cashier leaving for school in Atlanta next year. The Tuchmans won't learn those stories, though, just as they won't learn each other's, even the shared ones. Victor is the force that brings them together but also the rift that divides them. Alex wants the truth about her father, and Barbra won't tell her; Gary wants the truth about his disintegrating marriage, and Twyla can't explain. Prickly and unsentimental, but never quite hopeless, Attenberg (All Grown Up, 2017, etc.), poet laureate of difficult families, captures the relentlessly lonely beauty of being alive.Not a gentle novel but a deeply tender one. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist-Rezension
Adult siblings Alex and Gary respond to their father's impending death with opposing tacks. Alex hops the next plane to New Orleans, where Gary and their parents, Victor and Barbra, live; Gary. meanwhile, is in Los Angeles and can't seem to get himself to leave. His wife, Twyla, joins Alex and Barbra at Victor's bedside in his absence. Barbra wants Alex to make peace with her unconscious father, but Alex is dying to know something even more private: why Barbra, an unequivocally cool customer, has stayed with tyrannical Victor all these years. Information! She wanted nothing more than that. Attenberg's (The Middlesteins, 2012; All Grown Up, 2017) seventh work of fiction is experienced mostly through Alex, Barbra, and Twyla, each one a terrifically nuanced character that's nearly impenetrable to the others yet intoxicatingly available to readers. As the story unfolds largely over a single day, memories are purged and bombshells dropped, not to mention the ever-curious matter of the vexing central character rendered mute for the duration. Attenberg writes with a deeply human understanding of her characters, and the fact that, when it comes to family, things are rarely well enough to leave alone.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal-Rezension
Victor Tuchman is the family patriarch in this whirling dervish of a novel. The story unfolds on the day he has a fatal heart attack. Victor was a criminal in his business life and a tyrant in his personal life. His wife Barbra, pacing the hospital halls, is counting her steps and recounting their dysfunctional life together. Daughter Alex, an attorney in Chicago, flies to New Orleans, not for a final goodbye but to cajole her mother into spilling the beans about her father's criminality. Gary, Victor's son, is in Los Angeles and deliberately misses his flight, unwilling to say goodbye,--which is understandable, as he rehashes his life with the abusive man lying in the hospital bed. Gary's wife, Twyla, does visit, her mind wandering through her Southern upbringing and a disastrous, shocking affair. Attenberg (All Grown Up) is a master of subtlety as she divulges everyone's thoughts, including the one-off characters such as the clerk at a CVS and the coroner. The unusual twist here is that readers learn all their stories while the characters do not. VERDICT Contemporary family sagas don't get much better than this novel, which should appeal to fans of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections or Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach. [See Prepub Alert, 3/25/19.]--Stacy Alesi, Eugene M. & Christine E. Lynn Lib., Lynn Univ., Boca Raton, FL