The Hole We're In

Starred review from January 11, 2010
Zevin (YA novel Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
, etc.) delivers in her blazing second adult novel a Corrections
for our recessionary times. While Roger Pomeroy spins his middle-aged wheels in graduate school, his wife, George, supports the family mainly via an ever larger number of credit cards opened in her recent college grad son Vinnie’s name. Meanwhile, daughter Helen insists on an expensive wedding, and youngest daughter Patsy gets pregnant and is transferred to a religious school out of state. Struggling to stay afloat, Roger and George deplete Patsy’s college fund, and Patsy in turn enlists in the army for the tuition benefits. She’s sent to Iraq and comes back injured and suffering from PTSD. Roger, in a not-quite-convincing turn, becomes an ultra-conservative Christian pastor, and long-suffering George goes off the deep end. Zevin mixes sharp humor with moments of grace as she gives readers terrific insights into the problems of adult children removing themselves from the influence of parents, and establishes herself as an astute chronicler of the way we spend now.

January 1, 2010
Picture-perfect evangelical family spirals out of control.

Zeroing in on the high anxiety that credit-starved Americans feel in the current economic climate, Zevin (Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac, 2007, etc.) delivers a bitter yet believable portrait of the national dream gone terribly wrong. Broken into four sections that jump from 2000 to 2006 to 2012 to 2022, the novel chronicles the high times and bottom-hitting lows of a daydreaming dad and compulsive shopper mom who are trying to raise a family in the Seventh Day Adventist faith while keeping secrets that wreak havoc on their children. Roger Pomeroy is a 42-year-old former pastor who decides to go back to school and earn a doctorate, a decision that pushes his family to the brink of starvation while he carries on a sordid affair with his supervising professor. His wife Georgia, a data-entry clerk, is sucking the family credit cards dry to pay for the wedding of eldest daughter Helen. Despite their lies, Roger and Georgia are comforted by their faith."The world tells you that all these secular debts matter, but my whole reason for being put here on this earth is to tell you that they do not. The only debts that matter are spiritual debts," advises the preacher at their church. Georgia's financial shenanigans, including the acquisition of credit cards in her children's names, are hard on all the kids, but hardest on youngest daughter Patsy, who joins the Army in an attempt to earn enough money for college and is sent to Afghanistan.

Zevin's ambitious reach into the future may put off some readers, but others will warm to her clear-eyed compassion for people doing the best they can and wreaking considerable damage along the way.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

February 1, 2010
Zevin is the author of the adult novel Margarettown (2005) and two YA novels (Elsewhere, 2005, and Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac, 2007). Here she jettisons the fantasy element that has been a hallmark of her work for a sharp, funny, and timely look at a debt-ridden, God-fearing American family. When Evangelical Christian Roger uproots his family to Texas to pursue a PhD, his hapless wife, Georgia, attempting to support the family on a temps salary, heedlessly throws unopened bills in a kitchen drawer. When their financial house of cards finally falls, it is the youngest daughter, feisty Patsy, who pays the price; forced to enroll in the army in order to pay for college, she ends up being shipped off to Iraq. Zevin skewers a host of social issues from religious zealotry to the consequences of war to the entitlement mind-set of average Americans. What makes her book more than just a satire, though, is the deft way she thoroughly humanizes her characters. Readers will relate to and be moved by a beleaguered familys attempts to climb out of debt and dysfunction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)