In the Family Way: An Urban Comedy - Hardcover

Schwartz, Lynne S.

3.28

97 ratings by Goodreads

9780688170714: In the Family Way: An Urban Comedy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688170714 ISBN 13: 9780688170714

Publisher: William Morrow, 1999

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Roy, a psychotherapist, and his first wife, Bea, a caterer, are the characters around which this hilarious and unpredictable novel revolves. The other players include their four children, their assorted friends and lovers, as well as Roy's subsequent two wives, one of whom he steals from a patient. Not to mention Bea's lover--the Russian imigri superintendent--her lesbian artist sister, and her caustic mother, the landlady of the chaotic building. Throughout the novel, Bea and Roy struggle to redefine the idea of family without giving up the fantasy of endless self-gratification. Entanglements, betrayals, couplings, and uncouplings abound, as each person seeks love and happiness in the free-for-all '90s. Roy, a psychotherapist, and his first wife, Bea, a caterer, are the characters around which this hilarious and unpredictable novel revolves. The other players include their four children, their assorted friends and lovers, as well as Roy's subsequent two wives, one of whom he steals from a patient. Not to mention Bea's lover--the Russian imigri superintendent--her lesbian artist sister, and her caustic mother, the landlady of the chaotic building. Throughout the novel, Bea and Roy struggle to redefine the idea of family without giving up the fantasy of endless self-gratification. Entanglements, betrayals, couplings, and uncouplings abound, as each person seeks love and happiness in the free-for-all '90s.

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Review:

Lynne Sharon Schwartz prefaces her urban comedy with this bit of wisdom: "The true narrative form of our time is the sitcom." In the Family Way, Schwartz's personal Three's Company, is populated by an extended Manhattan family who dwell in an Upper West Side apartment building like bees in a hive. Their queen is, appropriately enough, Bea, a wild-haired, warm-hearted, middle-aged caterer who once was married to Roy, a therapist. Roy, however, left her for cool Serena, who in turn left Roy for Bea's sister May. Now all live under the same roof, along with several of their children and Roy's third wife, Lisa, who is the math teacher of Roy and Bea's daughter Sara--who, incidentally, prefers to be called Shimmer. Bea is having an affair with the super, Dmitri, a Russian given to poetic flights which come thudding to earth when he misremembers his thesaurus. (He whispers ardently to her, "My love. My wild orchid. My landscape with the secret bog.") Meanwhile, Bea's mother, the landlady, is busily trying to lure Oscar, the doorman, into bed. Three of the tribe become pregnant, yielding a climactic three-babies-in-one-night set piece that caps a novel crowded with delightfully implausible coincidence.

Anyone familiar with Schwartz's exquisite Disturbances in the Field--unaccountably out of print--knows her to be a serious and ambitious novelist. So what's she doing in Full House territory? Writing a damned entertaining novel, that's what, and using comic form to comment caustically on the way we live now. Roy, for instance, tells himself, "as he often told his patients: Not all guilt is something you want to get rid of. Some guilt is justified--if, that is, you choose to inhabit a moral universe." Bea and her family earnestly want to live in a moral universe, but don't quite, and their ambivalence and guilt give Schwartz's frolic a sour, pungent undercurrent. It's the taste of reality's failures, and it turns out to be what sitcoms have been missing all along. --Claire Dederer

About the Author:

Lynne Sharon Schwartz is the author of eleven books, including the novels The Fatigue Artist and Leaving Brooklyn and two short story collections. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Essays, and many other places, and her reviews, essays, and satirical pieces have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers. Her books have been nominated for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. She lives in New York City.

Praise for Lynne Sharon Schwartz:
"Lynne Sharon Schwartz fixes upon the world an anthropologist's clear eye, as though the contemporary, familiar-seeming people she writes about were members of a lost tribe whose habits and ways she has documented." --Daphne Merkin, Los Angeles Times

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