An audio book
Salo Oppenheimer is rich. When younger he was driving when an accident killed his friend and injured another passenger, Stella. He marries Johanna. They're nominally Jews. They have expensive treatment to have children because she wants them. He collects art. He gets a warehouse to store it in. They have triplets. The girl, Sally is the PoV. Salo remains rather distant. The children learn from their mother about his european travels as a student. There's a description of the kids' time in school and college, their mother managing things - the triplets don't get on with each other. There'a a lot of compare/constrast. Sally thinks the kids' personalities changed little since birth. She fears she's a lesbian. At an art gallery she fancies a woman who turns out to be Stella - a black who her father has been sleeping with for years. Johanna discovers that Stella has a child by Salo. She gets her remaining fertilising egg out of storage and hires a womb.
Harrison goes to a study commune (all boys) for auto-didacts, where they do farmwork. His hero autodidact Eli is there. To Harrison's surprise he's black. Eli accuses a fellow student of copying his work. He invites Harrison to a special mini-conference.
Sally's room-mate at Cornell is Rochelle. Sally has few friends. Lewyn goes to the same college but they don't tell friends about each other. His room-mate Jonas is a Mormon. They go to each other's rituals. Lewyn and Rochelle become friends. It dawns on Lewyn who her room-mate is but he keeps quiet about the connection even when he shares the room with Rochelle when Sally moves out to stay in a furniture trader's house. Rochelle tells him that she thinks Sally is a lesbian. When Phoebe (the triplets' sister) is 14 months and the triplets reach their 19th birthday, Salo realises he's in love with Stella, but still doesn't realise that others know about his affair. Rochelle's invited to the family house, still unaware that her boyfriend is Sally's brother. Not only is this embarrassingly revealed (Rochelle breaks with Lewyn), but Harrison blurts out that Sally's a lesbian. Salo dies on a 9/11 flight the next day. on the way to Stella.
In Part III Phoebe, 17, is the first person narrator. Harrison (Harvard) runs the family company, appears on TV and his best friend is Eli who visits the white house (a black republican). Sally still clears houses. Lewyn lives at home. She learns she was IVF-conceived at the same time as her siblings. This makes her want to be closer to her siblings. He tells her about his temporary conversion to Mormonism. Sally confesses for the first time that she has a girlfriend and tells Phoebe that their father had a mistress.
She discovers that she knows her half-brother already. Efron. She and Lewyn meet Stella. Efron writes an article about Eli - he'd been born white but made himself black. Harrison has never met Efron. He now respects him. Phoebe meets Rochelle - a divorced lawyer - who needs her cluttered mother's house cleared. Sally does it. She and Lewyn get together. Phoebe decides to go to the now dual-gender college that Harrison went to.
At the end Johanna tells Phoebe she's gay. She regrets not telling them about the Salo's accident - it would have made Salo's behaviour more acceptable. Johanna tells Phoebe that she's far from an after-thought. She's the one reviving the family - a phoenix.
The plot's tidy, with happy endings and discussible themes. Some sections - the watermelon section and the religious monologues for example - go on too long for me. Perhaps this is because it's an audio book. With a paper book I'd have sprinted through those passages.
Other reviews
- Allegra Goodman (Korelitz’s plot points are in some ways old-fashioned — a tragic accident, an extramarital affair, a secret bequest, a mysterious letter — and in some ways new: “therapy goals,” cancel culture ... Its protagonists reinvent themselves with astonishing ingenuity.)
- goodreads
- Meredith Maran (Thoroughly modern social satire! Tonally spot-on chapter titles, like “Summer Lovers: In which Sally Oppenheimer discovers her brother’s snakeliness, and contemplates the entire baffling mosh pit of adult life.” Soaring sentences like this one, in which Triplet Harrison describes his life to date. “Eighteen years of being coddled, overscheduled, and overseen, paid attention to in all the worst ways (and none of the ways that mattered), housed and clothed and fed and amused in a manner commensurate with his family’s endemic wealth.”)
- kirkusreviews (A bit slow in the middle section but on balance, a satisfyingly twisty tale rooted in complex characterizations)
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