In Case We're Separated
Connected Stories
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Spanning the length and breadth of the twentieth century, Alice Mattison's masterful In Case We're Separated looks at a family of Jewish immigrants in the 1920s and 1930s and follows the urban, emotionally turbulent lives of their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren against a backdrop of political assassination, the Vietnam War, and the AIDS epidemic. Beginning with the title story, which introduces Bobbie Kaplowitz—a single mother in 1954 Brooklyn whose lover is married and whose understanding of life is changed by a broken kitchen appliance—Mattison displays her unparalleled gift for storytelling and for creating rich, multidimensional characters, a gift that has led the Los Angeles Times to praise her as "a writer's writer."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A double sestina consists of 12 six-line stanzas, with each line repeating one of six (usually unrelated) words, and the poem ends in a three-line envoi. Mattison's (Men Giving Money, Women Yelling) prose version spans several generations of a Brooklyn family via 13 short stories: each repeats six images a glass of water, a sharp point, a cord, a mouth, an exchange of items and a map that may be wrong and the last story is shorter by half than the others. As characters take turns serving as protagonists and secondary characters, multiple, amusing and often devastating perspectives on the Kaplowitz clan emerge. The title piece begins in 1954, when the divorced Bobbie Kaplowitz's Thursday-night-and-Saturday-morning boyfriend exchanges her electric mixer for another, and realizations ensue. "I Am Not Your Mother" swiftly and mercilessly tackles clannish pre-WWI immigrant experience, while "Boy in Winter," set in the present, constructs a brilliant minimystery, as gay urban studies writer Brad moves with partner Warren to Wanda, Wis., and then to Somerville, Mass. Noisier and brighter if not as broad in scope as Joan Silber's recent, also interlinked Ideas of Heaven, Mattison's stories have an arresting focus and navigate the clich s of Jewish-American fiction firmly and knowingly. As the images repeat and characters recur, the family's involuntary interconnectedness emerges starkly, even as the characters experience wildly differing epiphanies and have varied, vivid reactions to them.
