For more than thirty years, Edie and Richard Middlestein shared a solid family life together in the suburbs of Chicago. But now things are splintering apart, for one reason, it seems: Edie’s enormous girth. She’s obsessed with food–thinking about it, eating it–and if she doesn’t stop, she won’t have much longer to live.
When Richard abandons his wife, it is up to the next generation to take control. Robin, their schoolteacher daughter, is determined that her father pay for leaving Edie. Benny, an easy-going, pot-smoking family man, just wants to smooth things over. And Rachelle– a whippet thin perfectionist– is intent on saving her mother-in-law’s life, but this task proves even bigger than planning her twin children’s spectacular b’nai mitzvah party. Through it all, they wonder: do Edie’s devastating choices rest on her shoulders alone, or are others at fault, too?
With pitch-perfect prose, huge compassion, and sly humor, Jami Attenberg has given us an epic story of marriage, family, and obsession. The Middlesteins explores the hopes and heartbreaks of new and old love, the yearnings of Midwestern America, and our devastating, fascinating preoccupation with food.
About Jami Attenberg
Jami Attenberg is the author of a story collection, Instant Love, and two novels, The Kept Man and The Melting Season. She has contributed essays and criticism to The New York Times, Print, Nylon, Time Out New York, BookForum, Nerve, and many other publications. She lives in New York and is originally from Chicago.
Editorial Review
Former lawyer Edie Middlestein has always been a large presence, brilliant as a lawyer, loving as a mother, shrewish as a wife. Since early childhood, food has been her private if not secret passion. The novel is organized according to Edie’s fluctuations in weight, and the descriptions of her sensual joy in the gluttony that may be killing her are often mouthwatering. Sixty-ish Edie is obese and ravaged by diabetes. When her pharmacist husband, Richard, leaves her shortly before she’s scheduled for an operation, Edie’s children are outraged. Thirty-one-year-old teacher Robin is a fearful near alcoholic who has avoided intimacy since a disastrous experience in high school. Ironically, her new self-proclaimed hatred of her father opens her to the possibility of a relationship with her geeky neighbor Daniel, a gentle soul with a hidden but strong spine, not unlike Robin’s older brother Benny. Benny is happily married to Rachelle, a woman of fierce protectiveness who initially denies Richard all access to his grandchildren to punish him for his desertion. Is Richard a heartless, selfish man, or is he correct that Edie left him years before he left her? A little of both. All these characters feel more than one emotion at a time, and all are more than they first seem. Edie is an overbearing matriarch in her family, but a lovable saint to the owner of her favorite Chinese restaurant. Richard is a schlemiel, except that he is capable of real love. While the novel focuses intensely on each member of the family, it also offers a panoramic, more broadly humorous, verging-on-caricature view of the Midwestern Jewish suburbia in which the Middlesteins are immersed, from the shopping centers to the synagogues. But as the Middlesteins and their friends move back and forth in time, their lives take on increasing depth individually and together. – Kirkus Reviews
Jami Attenberg’s “The Middlesteins” reviewed by Ron Charles
The Washington Post Book Review – October 23, 2012 (Excerpt)
Do we really need “The Middlesteins”? It looks like another quiet novel stuck in the suburbs, another mordant comedy about a dysfunctional Jewish family, another bittersweet take on the relationship between food and love. Is Jami Attenberg fixing us the pastrami-on-rye sandwich of literary fiction that we’ve eaten thousands of times before?
Well, as any deli patron knows: There are sandwiches and then there are sandwiches. Attenberg, a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, combines the rather ordinary ingredients of her fourth novel to make something worth chewing on.
“The Middlesteins” is the story of a dangerously overweight woman and the relatives who are trying, in various ineffectual ways, to save her life when “everything about her was collapsing.” There are sweet sentimental temptations all over a plot like this, but Attenberg writes with restraint and just a dash of bitterness. The result is a story that repeatedly tosses off little bursts of wisdom that catch you off guard. [Read the full article...]
‘Middlesteins’ Digs Into The Dark Side Of Food
NPR Book Review – October 24, 2012 (Excerpt)
Food appears so often and takes on so much importance in Jami Attenberg’s novel The Middlesteins, that while reading it I sometimes felt like I was on a kind of literary cruise ship. But excess isn’t presented here wantonly; instead, it’s laid out and explored with sympathy, thought and depth. Early on, the parents of the main character think, “Food was made of love, and was what made love, and they could never deny themselves a bite of anything they desired.” And so the novel takes off from the evocative starting point known as appetite.
The child of those parents grows up to be Edie Middlestein, the obese matriarch of the novel’s eponymous family, who reaches well over 300 pounds before the book is through. The other Middlesteins know she is killing herself with food, but they are helpless to stop her.
After her husband, Richard, leaves her, Edie’s adult children, Robin and Benny, become enmeshed in their estranged parents’ lives. The family members’ interactions and overlaps, their dissonant styles and divergent needs, create much of the drama of this novel, which sports a blurb from Jonathan Franzen and has its own Corrections-y, multiple-viewpoints-of-a-Midwestern-family feel to it, though with distinctly Jewish flourishes. [Read the full article...]
Hungry Hearts And Family Matters In ‘Middlesteins’
NPR Book Review – November 20, 2012 (Excerpt)
At first glance, a novel in which the main character eats herself to death may not seem like the most felicitous pick for Thanksgiving week; but The Middlesteins turns out to be a tough but affecting story about family members putting up with each other, even in their most unlovely, chewing-with-their-mouths-open life moments. If you have a Thanksgiving family reunion looming before you that doesn’t exactly promise to be a Norman Rockwell painting, The Middlesteinsmay just be the perfect literary corrective to overindulgence in high-calorie holiday expectations.
The main character of Jami Attenberg’s black comedy is Edie Middlestein, a woman in late middle age suffering from diabetes and other complications of a lifelong addiction to food. From a husky girlhood filled with thick liverwurst sandwiches and salty pickles to her obese present, Edie has thought of food as joy; in fact, it’s been the only dependable happiness of her life. [Read the full article...]
Suburban Sprawl - ‘The Middlesteins,’ by Jami Attenberg
The New York Times Book Review – December 27, 2012 (Excerpt)
There’s a touching paradox in the first chapter of Jami Attenberg’s caustic, entertaining and bighearted new novel, “The Middlesteins.” Edie, 5 years old and 62 pounds, is already too solid, in her mother’s estimation, too big for her age. But how can her mother not feed her, when she and her husband feel that food is “made of love, and love . . . made of food”? How can these parents deny Edie life-giving nourishment when Edie’s father, a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine, nearly starved on his journey to Chicago and has never been able to get enough to eat since? Even though it’s clear that young Edie suffers under her own weight — she huffs and puffs up the stairs “like someone’s gassy old uncle after a meal” — her mother can’t refuse her the liverwurst and rye bread she loves. This is a Jewish mother after all, and those of us who’ve had one know that the message, when it comes to food, is always have a little more. It’s an attitude that comes not just from love, but also from fear; a history fraught with disaster and hunger gives rise to the feeling that one must always be prepared. Therefore, bubbeleh, have another matzo ball.
Food keeps us alive, yes. But it can also kill us. That subject has become a cultural obsession, inciting cautionary documentaries (HBO’s “Weight of the Nation” series), reality TV shows (“The Biggest Loser” and “Dance Your Ass Off”), large-scale civic regulations (New York’s banning of trans fats and oversize sugary drinks), and, at the White House, an enormous kitchen garden carved from the first lawn, along with a book (Michelle Obama’s “American Grown”) and a presidential call for action to improve America’s eating habits. This novel takes the issue personally: Edie Middlestein, the novel’s larger-than-life protagonist, is killing herself by overeating, and her family can’t bear to watch. [Read the full article...]
Advertisement
THE LONDONDERRY AIR
Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler
It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.
With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.
The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.
For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.
The Middlesteins: The Story of a Chicago Family by Jami Attenberg
For more than thirty years, Edie and Richard Middlestein shared a solid family life together in the suburbs of Chicago. But now things are splintering apart, for one reason, it seems: Edie’s enormous girth. She’s obsessed with food–thinking about it, eating it–and if she doesn’t stop, she won’t have much longer to live.
When Richard abandons his wife, it is up to the next generation to take control. Robin, their schoolteacher daughter, is determined that her father pay for leaving Edie. Benny, an easy-going, pot-smoking family man, just wants to smooth things over. And Rachelle– a whippet thin perfectionist– is intent on saving her mother-in-law’s life, but this task proves even bigger than planning her twin children’s spectacular b’nai mitzvah party. Through it all, they wonder: do Edie’s devastating choices rest on her shoulders alone, or are others at fault, too?
With pitch-perfect prose, huge compassion, and sly humor, Jami Attenberg has given us an epic story of marriage, family, and obsession. The Middlesteins explores the hopes and heartbreaks of new and old love, the yearnings of Midwestern America, and our devastating, fascinating preoccupation with food.
About Jami Attenberg
Jami Attenberg is the author of a story collection, Instant Love, and two novels, The Kept Man and The Melting Season. She has contributed essays and criticism to The New York Times, Print, Nylon, Time Out New York, BookForum, Nerve, and many other publications. She lives in New York and is originally from Chicago.
Editorial Review
Former lawyer Edie Middlestein has always been a large presence, brilliant as a lawyer, loving as a mother, shrewish as a wife. Since early childhood, food has been her private if not secret passion. The novel is organized according to Edie’s fluctuations in weight, and the descriptions of her sensual joy in the gluttony that may be killing her are often mouthwatering. Sixty-ish Edie is obese and ravaged by diabetes. When her pharmacist husband, Richard, leaves her shortly before she’s scheduled for an operation, Edie’s children are outraged. Thirty-one-year-old teacher Robin is a fearful near alcoholic who has avoided intimacy since a disastrous experience in high school. Ironically, her new self-proclaimed hatred of her father opens her to the possibility of a relationship with her geeky neighbor Daniel, a gentle soul with a hidden but strong spine, not unlike Robin’s older brother Benny. Benny is happily married to Rachelle, a woman of fierce protectiveness who initially denies Richard all access to his grandchildren to punish him for his desertion. Is Richard a heartless, selfish man, or is he correct that Edie left him years before he left her? A little of both. All these characters feel more than one emotion at a time, and all are more than they first seem. Edie is an overbearing matriarch in her family, but a lovable saint to the owner of her favorite Chinese restaurant. Richard is a schlemiel, except that he is capable of real love. While the novel focuses intensely on each member of the family, it also offers a panoramic, more broadly humorous, verging-on-caricature view of the Midwestern Jewish suburbia in which the Middlesteins are immersed, from the shopping centers to the synagogues. But as the Middlesteins and their friends move back and forth in time, their lives take on increasing depth individually and together. – Kirkus Reviews
Jami Attenberg’s “The Middlesteins” reviewed by Ron Charles
The Washington Post Book Review – October 23, 2012 (Excerpt)
Do we really need “The Middlesteins”? It looks like another quiet novel stuck in the suburbs, another mordant comedy about a dysfunctional Jewish family, another bittersweet take on the relationship between food and love. Is Jami Attenberg fixing us the pastrami-on-rye sandwich of literary fiction that we’ve eaten thousands of times before?
Well, as any deli patron knows: There are sandwiches and then there are sandwiches. Attenberg, a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, combines the rather ordinary ingredients of her fourth novel to make something worth chewing on.
“The Middlesteins” is the story of a dangerously overweight woman and the relatives who are trying, in various ineffectual ways, to save her life when “everything about her was collapsing.” There are sweet sentimental temptations all over a plot like this, but Attenberg writes with restraint and just a dash of bitterness. The result is a story that repeatedly tosses off little bursts of wisdom that catch you off guard. [Read the full article...]
‘Middlesteins’ Digs Into The Dark Side Of Food
NPR Book Review – October 24, 2012 (Excerpt)
Food appears so often and takes on so much importance in Jami Attenberg’s novel The Middlesteins, that while reading it I sometimes felt like I was on a kind of literary cruise ship. But excess isn’t presented here wantonly; instead, it’s laid out and explored with sympathy, thought and depth. Early on, the parents of the main character think, “Food was made of love, and was what made love, and they could never deny themselves a bite of anything they desired.” And so the novel takes off from the evocative starting point known as appetite.
The child of those parents grows up to be Edie Middlestein, the obese matriarch of the novel’s eponymous family, who reaches well over 300 pounds before the book is through. The other Middlesteins know she is killing herself with food, but they are helpless to stop her.
After her husband, Richard, leaves her, Edie’s adult children, Robin and Benny, become enmeshed in their estranged parents’ lives. The family members’ interactions and overlaps, their dissonant styles and divergent needs, create much of the drama of this novel, which sports a blurb from Jonathan Franzen and has its own Corrections-y, multiple-viewpoints-of-a-Midwestern-family feel to it, though with distinctly Jewish flourishes. [Read the full article...]
Hungry Hearts And Family Matters In ‘Middlesteins’
NPR Book Review – November 20, 2012 (Excerpt)
At first glance, a novel in which the main character eats herself to death may not seem like the most felicitous pick for Thanksgiving week; but The Middlesteins turns out to be a tough but affecting story about family members putting up with each other, even in their most unlovely, chewing-with-their-mouths-open life moments. If you have a Thanksgiving family reunion looming before you that doesn’t exactly promise to be a Norman Rockwell painting, The Middlesteinsmay just be the perfect literary corrective to overindulgence in high-calorie holiday expectations.
The main character of Jami Attenberg’s black comedy is Edie Middlestein, a woman in late middle age suffering from diabetes and other complications of a lifelong addiction to food. From a husky girlhood filled with thick liverwurst sandwiches and salty pickles to her obese present, Edie has thought of food as joy; in fact, it’s been the only dependable happiness of her life. [Read the full article...]
Suburban Sprawl - ‘The Middlesteins,’ by Jami Attenberg
The New York Times Book Review – December 27, 2012 (Excerpt)
There’s a touching paradox in the first chapter of Jami Attenberg’s caustic, entertaining and bighearted new novel, “The Middlesteins.” Edie, 5 years old and 62 pounds, is already too solid, in her mother’s estimation, too big for her age. But how can her mother not feed her, when she and her husband feel that food is “made of love, and love . . . made of food”? How can these parents deny Edie life-giving nourishment when Edie’s father, a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine, nearly starved on his journey to Chicago and has never been able to get enough to eat since? Even though it’s clear that young Edie suffers under her own weight — she huffs and puffs up the stairs “like someone’s gassy old uncle after a meal” — her mother can’t refuse her the liverwurst and rye bread she loves. This is a Jewish mother after all, and those of us who’ve had one know that the message, when it comes to food, is always have a little more. It’s an attitude that comes not just from love, but also from fear; a history fraught with disaster and hunger gives rise to the feeling that one must always be prepared. Therefore, bubbeleh, have another matzo ball.
Food keeps us alive, yes. But it can also kill us. That subject has become a cultural obsession, inciting cautionary documentaries (HBO’s “Weight of the Nation” series), reality TV shows (“The Biggest Loser” and “Dance Your Ass Off”), large-scale civic regulations (New York’s banning of trans fats and oversize sugary drinks), and, at the White House, an enormous kitchen garden carved from the first lawn, along with a book (Michelle Obama’s “American Grown”) and a presidential call for action to improve America’s eating habits. This novel takes the issue personally: Edie Middlestein, the novel’s larger-than-life protagonist, is killing herself by overeating, and her family can’t bear to watch. [Read the full article...]