The Middlesteins
I finished up The White Lotus on HBO about a week ago. That’s about the same time I started The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg, so let’s hear it for Americans’ ability to find themselves in despondent situations despite incredible resources and relative wealth. That’s one of our “modern ails,” right?
In The Middlesteins, we’ve got: (fast) food as love, pitch-perfect b’nai mitzvahs as love, idyllic suburban life as love, and acerbic and angsty disgust-with-everything as (somehow) love. I’m not sure this “life is perfect, but I’m so depressed” phenomenon is necessarily unique to Americans, but we do have a good dollop of it. In fact, Attenberg brings in a few “outsider” characters to perhaps remind readers that we should read this as an American novel: a British-born widow, a Chinese-born widower, and Edie Middlestein’s father who “had starved on his long journey from Ukraine to Chicago…and had never been able to fill himself up since.” They stick out in their straight-forwardness.
The Middlesteins is a novel about health and wealth and what those two things really mean. It’s definitely a novel about mortality: “’Mortality’—that was a word [teenaged Emily, granddaughter to obese Edie] had learned recently, something that had been discussed in Hebrew school. She had heard it before, she knew what it meant, but it had never applied before. Life in the biblical world was so fragile. Everyone was afraid of death at any moment. Everything was so epic, there was so much potential for disaster, storms, floods, pestilence. Diabetes (now also on the Things That Suck list) felt biblical.”
Much like how I’d sum up viewing The White Lotus, I started out liking The Middlesteins just fine. They were depressing, in an “ugh, get it together, people” kind of way. And then I got toward the denouement of both and felt, “Wow, this is really something.” However, The Middlesteins is next level: I started reading the beginning of Attenberg’s novel again and felt “this is something” even more so about the book. In fact, I’m wondering if The Middlesteins is on any high school reading lists? It should be.
(But honestly: What happened to Lani on The White Lotus???)
originally published on instagram