Strangers and Cousins

Starred review from June 10, 2019
Cohen’s captivating, lyrical latest (after The Grief of Others
) takes on the wedding novel and deepens it with weighty themes of death, trauma, and social unrest. While the story ostensibly confines itself to the four days preceding and the day of the wedding of flighty Clem to her more grounded college girlfriend Diggs at Clem’s childhood home in the Hudson Valley, it flashes back in time to the childhood of Clem’s great-aunt Glad, who was hurt physically and emotionally in a devastating fire in 1927. Cohen darts through the minds of dozens of wedding guests and family members, most of whom are concerned not just with the upcoming nuptials, for which no one is adequately prepared, but also with the recent influx of ultra-Orthodox Jews into the small town, where it is feared they will lower property values, gut the public education system, and make war with more liberal Jews, such as Clem’s father. By book’s end—after the theft of a wedding ring, a destructive storm, and another fire—the characters have rethought their notions of family and community. Even the most practical characters are frequently overwhelmed by spells of wild imagination and unreliable memories, adding a touch of magic. This enticing novel shimmers among its many well-defined points of view, exploring the psychic depths of a seemingly ordinary event.

June 15, 2019
A ramshackle manse in upstate New York will go up for sale as soon as its owners finish putting on their daughter's wedding. The fictional town of Rundle Junction has had bad luck with pageants--in 1927, a five-day drama of "Past, Present, and Future Performed Daily by its Residents" ended in a tragedy that recalls the real Hartford, Connecticut, circus fire some years later. Though there is a monument in town, the event is largely forgotten eight decades later except in wisps of memory drifting through the mind of ancient Aunt Glad, who used to have a sister named Joy and now has a great-grandniece called Mantha, who has named her dolls Fear and Sadness. Mantha's sister, "Clementine Esther Erlend Blumenthal, firstborn child of Walter and Benita Blumenthal, soon to become Mrs. KC Diggins...her college girlfriend's wife," is on her way home with her college friends Chana and Hannah (called "the Ch/Hannahs") to put on an alternative wedding ceremony--a pageant, it seems--that her mother, Bennie, is skeptical about. Bennie has plenty on her mind besides the wedding, as she and husband Walter (called "Stalwart") are not on the same page about the ultra-Orthodox Jews who have been moving into their area, their arrival having had a dire effect on property values, public schools, etc., in other commuter towns. Notwithstanding, as soon as this wedding is over, they plan to sell and flee. Cohen (No Book but the World, 2014, etc.) delights in her quirky characters, her melodious sentences, her exuberant narrative flourishes, and her peeks into the distant future. "Tonight, while just a few feet below them Walter and Pim pee side by side into the toilet, while more than two hundred thousand miles away the moon rolls across the sky like a lost pill, the baby mice are growing. Veering toward their respective fates." She rolls out her winsome, multicultural, elaborately orchestrated plot like a magic carpet. Some readers will jump on. Others may feel their inner sourpuss stirring to life. One person's droll yet profound dramedy is another person's too-sweet cup of tea.

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