In the Berkshires, during an enervating July Fourth weekend, three generations of Frankels gather together in 2005 for a memorial to their beloved son, brother, and spouse, Leo Frankel, a journalist who was kidnapped and killed in the Iraq War the previous year. As memories of Leo float through the narrative, old resentments and new secrets float to the top like crude oil in a jar of hearts. Henkin didn’t break any new contextual ground here. He was going for the familiar themes of loss, perseverance, understanding, love despite all, forgiveness, and redemption within a garden-variety package tied up with some stock twine.

You’ve seen this family before in domestic dramas: the 21st century elite, pedigreed, liberal, secular family with a few black sheep conservatives. Just about all the Ivy League or first tier colleges are represented, and those who didn’t obtain their PhDs or MDs are smarter than the ones who did.

One of the three beautiful daughters, Noelle, seems overtly fabricated. Henkin is trying to convince the reader that Noelle was once a sex-obsessed alley cat who moved to Israel and, par to the characteristic flip side of the personal coin, became an Orthodox Jew, with the support of her American husband, also turned Orthodox Jewish. A portrayal of two extremes in one person is not an unusual profile, and in fact is a prevalent human composition.

However, I was not convinced that first-incarnation Noelle was anything but a free spirit--refreshing and curious, independent and phase-healthy. Her morphing into a compulsive Orthodox, adhering so rigidly that they even bring their own Kosher food from Israel to this weekend, rejecting the Kosher food offered by her parents, was patently unbelievable. Henkin was attempting to show a woman who, at different times, embraced opposite ends of the same continuum. But, I never felt he authenticated second-incarnation Noelle with the antecedent, obsessive traits required to appropriate her inflexible, almost morbid religiosity.

Leo’s parents, Marilyn and David, age 69, plan to announce their impending divorce to the clan. The author was demonstrating the statistically frequent rate of divorce that occurs between couples that have lost a child. But, Leo was not a child—he had a wife and child of his own. And, the elders’ breakup seemed contrived; it wasn’t convincingly organic, but rather a limply constructed story device.

There were other scenes and events that felt hatched rather than natural. It had the mainstream moue of a nighttime series, a repackaged but prosaic, recycled SISTERS BROTHERS-type entertainment.

MINOR SPOILER PARAGRAPH. The biggest stretch was to accept Thisbe’s (the widow) Calvinistic-type altruism in the face of a gift of two-hundred thousand dollars from the obscenely rich matriarch, 94-yr-old Gretchen, mother of David. Gretchen gave this check to Thisbe some time after Leo died, with no overt strings attached. Sure, with Gretchen, there were always Machievellian manipulations. But at 94? How menacing could she really be?? Again, another contrivance that I didn’t believe. And, the struggling grad student Thisbe, raising her and Leo’s son, refusing to cash the check out of issues of guilt, because she had fallen in love again at age thirty-two? She was barely getting by in Berkeley with her new partner. I find it difficult to swallow Thisbe’s altruism, her rationale for refusing help for her and Leo’s son, at least!

Henkin has a way with words--the figurative and aphoristic turn of phrase. These delightful nuggets peppered the story throughout, and provided a prose-rich sum of parts. However, the story itself remained rather bland and predictable. The memorial service, which was the intended highlight of the gathering, was anti-climactic, buttressed largely by the individual tributes. The sentiments weren’t enough to depict the event, except sketchily, and gave the special day a static representation.

The novel, while eloquent at intervals, did not consummately satisfy. Instead, the conventional arc was held together with chiefly reductive portraits and some pithy dialogue. A bit banal, with reflective moments. 3.25

Thank you to Net Galley for providing me an e-copy.