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Book review: All This Could Be Yours by Jami Attenberg

There’s nothing like an impending death to draw a family’s long-buried issues to the surface like worms in the rain, but Jami Attenberg uses a well-worn literary trope with particular skill in her fifth novel All This Could Be Yours.

This is not the American author’s first exploration of twisted familial relations — her debut The Middlesteins followed a family struggling with the protagonist’s obesity — but her portrait of the Tuchmans is particularly caustic.

Set over 48 hours in a hot New Orleans August, the story begins when the family’s 70-year-old patriarch Victor Tuchman suffers a massive heart attack. In her opening line, Attenberg leaves no room for ambiguity over his rotten character: “He was an angry man and he was an ugly man and he was tall and he was pacing,” and as his family wrestles with his demise, in long flashbacks we begin to excavate his poisonous impact.

There’s Victor’s wife, Barbra, a birdlike woman with a slavish devotion to her Fitbit; her newly divorced daughter Alex, determined to extract family secrets from her mother; Alex’s brother Gary, hiding out in California; and Twyla, his day-drinking, hot mess of a wife.

We track back to Barbra and Victor’s first meeting. She is beautiful and saucer-eyed — a “grand prize” — hiding the shame of an alcoholic father. He is toxic masculinity incarnate with “lips like ribbons”. When they meet at a shiva, Barbra observes that “he seemed to be simultaneously in pain and in complete control of it. She was later to find out that this was actually just sustained anger”. Their marriage reads like one of Victor’s shady business deals: “She’d keep his secrets and ask for nothing but objects” — or as Barbra’s friend Cora remarks: “He doesn’t want your pussy. He wants your soul.”

Nimble prose: Jami Attenberg (Zack Smith Photography)
Nimble prose: Jami Attenberg (Zack Smith Photography)

Attenberg’s prose is nimble, chopping from character to character — even briefly to minor roles, like the shop assistant who encounters Twyla buying lipsticks to ward off an emotional breakdown. Sometimes she pivots to address the reader. “Imagine you met a girl, a beautiful girl — and she was sweet and honest and healthy and clear minded,” she writes about Gary’s relationship with Twyla.It’s a trick she has employed before and it makes the reader feel more therapist than passive observer. In a tale of a family all desperately clamouring to be heard and understood, this feels appropriate.

All This Could Be Yours by Jami Attenberg (Profile, £14.99), buy it here.

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