Edmonton Journal (Alberta)

July 16, 2006 Sunday

Final Edition

SECTION: SUNDAY READER; Pg. D10

LENGTH: 580 words

HEADLINE: What does it mean to be a family?: Novelist finely draws foibles of two brothers

BYLINE: Sasha Roeder Mah, Freelance

BODY:

Family and Other Accidents

By Shari Goldhagen

Doubleday

259 pp.,

Jack and Connor are two brothers separated by 10 years and an immense unspoken chasm of loneliness, pain and confusion since the death of both their parents.

New York writer Shari Goldhagen has spun this tale from a short story she wrote while a senior at university. That original story was about a young couple on a cruise, Jack and Mona, who should have been having the time of their lives, but were not. Goldhagen never could entirely let go of Jack and Mona, and years later, she decided to flesh out their story, resulting in this luminous novel.

Into the mix Goldhagen has added a younger brother, Connor, whom Jack has been left to raise alone with the death of their self-absorbed parents. The two brothers internalize their childhood in vastly different ways. Jack, 10 years the senior, buries himself professionally under burgeoning piles of legal work in their late father's law firm. In his spare time, what little there is, he buries himself between the sheets with a steady stream of hot legal aides. Somewhere between the files and the fornicating, he finds brief windows of opportunity to throw some money and the occasional word of advice Connor's way.

Connor is left to negotiate teenage boyhood pretty much alone. Entirely lacking his brother's swagger and confidence, he is living in sheer terror of the hour his girlfriend Jenny's birth control pills will kick in. He cannot escape the vague feeling that he should love this girl, but isn't certain that he does. He certainly does all the right things when he's with her, attending dutifully to her explicit lovemaking instructions and always remembering to plant tender kisses on her forehead. ("She likes that.") Call it love or loneliness; either way, young Jenny is Connor's best defence against the nagging emptiness inside.

The years pass and the patterns set in childhood solidify into adult lifestyles. Both young men seem to just fall into the various milestones of their lives. As the title suggests, life is really just a haphazard series of accidents, anyway. Jack resists marriage for years but finally appears to give up the fight. A beautiful and brilliant woman picks up Connor in a bar one night and just never leaves. Both men end up party to accidental pregnancies. Motivated by that loneliness that still haunts them from childhood, both men fall in and out of affairs, despite the obvious fact that their wives are sustaining them emotionally. These women are the roots they cling to, but the intimacy required by long-term commitment wears on Jack and Connor. The brothers themselves share only a handful of real conversations over the years.

This all sounds a bit depressing, but it really isn't. As in most of our accidental lives, misfortune and tragedy walk these pages side by side with shared laughter, sheer silliness and moments of deep connection. The light just shines a bit brighter when you've been through the darkness, and that message is one of this novel's gifts to us. Gifts, also, are the characters of Jack and Connor, two young men drawn with clear authenticity and empathy by a woman. She loves them, and she's not afraid to show it, and there's not much chance you'll get through even the first chapter without also falling in love.

With a gifted mind and a warm heart, Shari Goldhagen offers this wonderful story of the messy, difficult, beautiful accident that is family.