Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn

July 7, 2008
Mattison's latest combines a dark comedy of manners with even darker midlife family suspense. Constance “Con” Tepper plays the starring role in two long vignettes that take place 14 years apart. In the first vignette, Con is 45 and staying in her mother Gertrude's Brooklyn apartment to watch the cat. During this episode, “Gert” has a terrifying and paralyzing experience, the repercussions of which affect both her and others' lives in the intervening years and in the later vignette. Although there are almost too many threads to keep track of in Con's story, the one that is most important and most fully realized jumps back to an even earlier episode: a mid-century correspondence between Gert and her friend Marlene Silverman. This fascinating epistolary device acts as a tempting breadcrumb trail through the women's lives and leads to the wrenching denouement. Though not all the subplots work (a major one involving Con's biracial daughter, Joanna, is flat), the overarching examination of friends and family is captivating.

August 1, 2008
The repercussions of one week in the spring of 1989 will haunt Constance Tepper for the rest of her life. While her mother is out of town visiting Marlene, her oldest friend, Con travels from her home in Philadelphia to Brooklyn to care for her mothers cat. Almost immediately, Cons purse is stolen, her daughter goes missing, Con decides to leave her husband, and, finally, she gets a phone call from Marlene saying that her mother has suddenly died. Fourteen years later, Con is forced to reconsider this traumatic time when visits from her daughter, ex-husband, and Marlene coincide. There is more than one way of telling the truth, Con discovers, and the tricks the mind can play after so much time make the elusiveness of memory either a blessing of self-defense or a catalyst for disaster. Mattisons narrative jumps from past to present abruptly, jarringly, demanding careful reading, which is rewardedwith Mattisons piquant reflections on the paradoxical capacity of secrets to destroy and unite.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)