Jami Attenberg, in her fourth and newest novel, The Middlesteins, gives us the rare sort of novel that captures exactly how it feels to live these days through the prism of a family in a very idiosyncratic culture, i.e. a Jewish culture. The book centers around the complex though endearing character of Edie Middlestein, matriarch of the novel’s eponymous family, who finds herself addicted to food, weighing more than 300 pounds and suffering from diabetes. The family balks at efforts to help Edie lose weight as well as in their efforts to understand how this obsession with food came about. To that extent, Attenberg gives a complicated, loving, absurd, sad, and yes, funny portrait of the larger obsession with addictions, whether food or otherwise, that plagues our American world. We live in a world in which we need our government to tell us that normal human beings don’t need a fountain soda big enough to kill a small animal. Attenberg enters and inhabits this world in a sympathetic yet often scathing manner that moves into satire as she attempts to show what the pursuit of happiness looks like today. She explores marriage—both those somewhat successful, and the less successful. She explores our obsession with food, whether with eating too much or an often equally hazardous obsession with health. Attenberg also attunes her talented writing insight to the absurdities and beauties of cultural Judaism, a Judaism in which twin bnei mitzvah prepare a rap bit for their bar mitzvah. As with her estimation of American culture, Attenberg writes of Jewish culture not without a critical eye, but with a loving sort of criticism that seeks to look toward a healthier culture, whether Jewish or not.
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