The Latecomer

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

aliyah

“Stendahl syndrome” was the name for this, he would eventually learn. Dizziness, confusion, even fainting, usually by foreign visitors in the act of viewing great art. It was called that because the French writer had given its first and best description: I was in a sort of ecstasy … Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty … I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations … Everything spoke so vividly to my soul … Life was drained from me …

ranunculi,

forcing rictus smiles,

Finally, finally, the tiniest pinprick of reality came through the force field of her stubborn delusion, presenting Johanna with the first filament of an idea. That they were two adults plus three children, made concurrently. That they were five humans cohabiting. That they were not, and never had been, a family.

her husband, what was more, while she hadn’t been paying nearly enough attention, had slipped past them all and disappeared—not in terms of his physical self, of course, though his physical self came home later and later each night, after longer and longer visits to his warehouse in Coney Island or Red Bank or wherever it was—but his attentive self, his essential self, which by then lived somewhere else entirely.

When

Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally were normal young people in just about every obvious way, well educated (despite what even she recognized as Walden’s worst tendencies), globally aware, and not even particularly acquisitive, despite our astonishing privilege. Individually they were a credit to themselves, if not to her. But as a family, they were still a failure.

davened

This child who was not her son Lewyn; his mother, that fleeing woman, was Stella Western, and his father was our father, Salo Oppenheimer.

This was the flaw in making a bargain with yourself. There is no one else there to agree to the terms.

I have given too much, our mother thought. And she had asked far, far too little in return.

caesura

au courant

what does namaste actually mean? It means: I bow to the divine light within you and you bow to the divine light within me.

Now I know yoga is not a religion, though we’ve all met practitioners we might describe as fanatics. But this little insight contains a great profundity: all of us, bringing our little lights together to form what the apostles of Jesus might have called ‘the light of the world.’ This is the spiritual, and it’s within and around us all, at all times. We may find our way to it through a text on a page. We may find it through love or our family and friends or in service to others. We may call this ‘God.’ It makes absolutely no difference what we call it: it is our divinity that makes each one of us deeply special.”

disapprobation.

her face a rictus of horror.

gobbet of wisdom

endemic

epistemology

semiotics

finials,

miasma of cannabis,

sartorial

quotidian

Tikkun olam.

Haggadahs

afikomen.

Haggadah

charoset

Shalom

Pesach.

Now, it’s a part of the Seder tradition to welcome the stranger to our table, and to link our story to the larger story we all share. When one suffers, everyone suffers. When one of us is still enslaved, no one is really free. That’s the big moral of the Seder. Of course, we’re Jewish, so we specialize in disagreeing about what things really mean. My mother, for example, used to say, this is what it boils down to: They hated us. They tried to kill us. We’re still here. Now let’s eat!”

kiddush

maror,

It was an almost comically head-smacking moment, the moment Harrison Oppenheimer understood that he himself was a young conservative intellectual. Naturally Eli Absalom Stone had seen that first. It was final proof, if proof were somehow necessary, that Eli was smarter.

She only smiled, rictus red.

a pastiche of teen movies and magazine stories about bad behavior in the suburbs.

terroir

irremediable

gloaming

proscenium stage

japanned,

her Potemkin family—

risible

gyres,

verdigris

oeuvre.

purloined