Here's her new novel's first line: "He was an angry man, and he was an ugly man, and he was tall, and he was pacing." A few paragraphs later, she shifts to Victor's long-suffering but disturbingly complicit wife, Barbra, who "sat on the couch, her posture tepid, shoulders loose, head slouched, no acknowledgement of his existence."Īttenberg's prose is never limp or tepid, though she occasionally over-reaches, as with a "self-important and disapproving" moon. Why should we be interested in reading about such an unequivocally bad person? For starters, because Attenberg's writing - as she demonstrated in her multifaceted portrait of the far-reaching repercussions of Edie Middlestein's food addiction - is full of brio. All This Could Be Yours, mostly set on a single, stifling August day in New Orleans following the heart attack of 73-year-old Victor Tuchman, is an autopsy of the considerable, lasting damage this toxic man has inflicted on his family. With her sixth novel, Jami Attenberg, best known for The Middlesteins (2004), secures her place as an oddly sparkling master of warped family sagas. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.
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