What Is Missing

August 1, 2019
Life gets complicated when two people quickly move from drinks to passion to cohabitation and trying to conceive amid family pressures and the inescapable burdens of the past. Henry, a successful New York fertility doctor of 55, meets Costanza, an Italian American translator of 39, while he is speaking at a conference in Florence and shepherding his son Andrew around museums. But Andrew and Costanza have already met, and something has clicked there, too. Frank, a literary critic, showed himself to be a smart, observant writer with his first book, The Mighty Franks (2017), a memoir of Hollywood and familial dysfunction. So he avoids anything as obvious as a simple romantic triangle in his fiction debut. Costanza meets Henry again in Manhattan, where she soon agrees to move in with him and shortly thereafter begins the IVF protocol because of her age and the trouble she had conceiving with her late husband, a famous Roth-like novelist. Frank is insightful and sympathetic on the mental and physical toll of her treatments, and he has a strong sense of family dynamics and crackling dialogue, especially in any scene featuring Henry's crotchety father or cynical other son. But the novel has a few problems. The cast is almost exclusively white and wealthy, which may dilute sympathy for all the shadows that darken their doorman-building lives. Hints about the plot's central revelation are fairly obvious, including moments of puzzling recognition and Andrew's alluding to Shakespeare's Hamlet and saying, "I am too much in the sun." Some of the writing tends to melodrama, and the sex scenes can be painful: "He didn't know if he was inside her or she was inside him. Their crotches were joined, soaked; electric." This from a fertility specialist? An uneven but overall impressive debut.

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August 26, 2019
Following the memoir The Mighty Franks, Frank’s memorable debut novel showcases father-son relationships and the primal drive to have children. Teenager Andrew Weissman meets Costanza, an Italian-American woman whose famous novelist husband died the previous year, while in Florence with his divorced father, Henry. Then Henry, an infertility specialist, meets Costanza in a museum, and the novel follows a quasi-Oedipal track with father and son attracted to the same captivating woman. Henry and Costanza’s romance takes center stage, as does their desire to conceive a child together, but Costanza and Andrew have a connection that makes Henry uneasy. Frank delves into how Henry’s hubris sabotages his relationships, shows Andrew feeling alienated by Henry, and explores how Costanza comes to grips with her complex marriage. The novel is filled with trenchant moments of sweetness and betrayal, as well a stunning reveal of the harrowing gauntlet infertile women go through to conceive. This is an intricate and dynamic examination of familial ties: both what strengthens them and what can tear them apart.

October 1, 2019
Memoirist Frank's (The Mighty Franks, 2017) first novel belongs to Henry, a New York City fertility doctor; his teenage son, Andrew; and Costanza, an Italian-American widow who quickly becomes embedded in their family. It's summertime in Florence when the book opens with all three staying in the same pensione. Andrew is the first to meet Costanza, who's in her late thirties, and nurtures something of a crush on her. But Henry falls for her too, and months after their return to New York, marries her. Readers learn that before the death of Costanza's much-older, famous husband, their marriage was unraveling over her desire to have a baby. When Costanza becomes a patient in Henry's IVF practice, a realistically portrayed, painstaking endeavor on its own, the family landscape shifts quickly, in unexpected and irrevocable ways. Frank's characters share the spotlight somewhat unsteadily, and their emotions sometimes feel just out of reach. Still, touching on heady topics with plot aplenty, this will easily appeal to readers who like to lose themselves in big, multivoiced dramas of love and family.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)