We Were the Lathams

Every Last One

Anna Quindlen

When seventeen-year-old Ruby Latham is out shopping for a prom dress one spring day, she remarks casually to her mother, Mary Beth, that she is thinking of breaking up with her longtime boyfriend Kiernan. It's a small thing, a remark made in passing, but it symbolizes the first crack in the Latham family's picture-perfect veneer. And like any flaw it weakens the integrity of the structure as a whole, allowing new fault lines to spring up all around it.

Suddenly things seem to be going downhill for the Lathams when they were going so well, before. Mary Beth's business is vandalized. Her relationship with her husband Glen has gotten stale. Her son Max is sinking into a depression after many years of being eclipsed by his handsome and popular twin brother Alex. Mary Beth finds herself struggling with the fact that one of her children doesn't seem to need her anymore, while another needs her too much. She tries to balance these concerns, her home life, and work life, until a shocking act of violence knocks her off her feet, and tears the Latham family apart forever. Now these old concerns seem silly and very far away as Mary Beth struggles to bring her family back together, and to come to terms with the loss of her old life.

The first half of the book starts slowly, as Quindlen introduces us to her characters, their friends, and their lives in great detail. Almost a little too slowly, maybe: we get a lot of scenes of Ruby and her friends talking and Mary Beth working and not a lot in the way of plot advancement. But this is carefully calculated by Quindlen--this quiet, sleepy quality--so that when Mary Beth and the Lathams are knocked down, we are too. She packs a huge emotional punch in her big POW! moment; usually when reviewers say something is "shocking" it's a bit hyperbolic. But not here. I literally started to shake when I realized what Quindlen had just had happen to the Latham family. I started this book in the evening and told myself that I would read until 1 AM, and then go directly to bed, but at 12:56 we reached the shocking moment, and of course I was up until I'd finished the book. I couldn't put it down, after that.

But again: that doesn't necessarily mean what you'd think. I didn't put the book down not because it was such a page turner that I couldn't wait until morning, but because I needed answers, needed to know how this horrible thing could have happened, and how the characters, especially Mary Beth, would react. And I had to keep reading and reading to find out, because she doesn't react, and I needed her to. It's almost as if the story is split into halves, without any connecting material between them. We have Mary Beth before and Mary Beth after, with very little connecting the two women to each other. We see her whole and we see her broken, but we don't really see the moment of breaking, and that was maddening to me. Mary Beth walls herself off from the scenes of violence, refusing to relive or even think about them, and while that's a valid way to grieve in real life it's maybe not the most effective for a novel. Because so much hinges on us feeling what Mary Beth feels. If Mary Beth can't bear to think about that moment in which she lost so much, we can't see through her eyes what was lost. While I understood her loss intellectually, I never felt as thought I experienced it emotionally. The result is somewhat sanitized, which is unlike Quindlen, who usually isn't afraid to turn over the rock and show all the crawly, ugly things beneath.

Ultimately, this is a novel about healing, and that's where Anna Quindlen shines. It's my opinion that Quindlen has been seriously off her game with her last two novels: Rise and Shine was insipid and baffling; Blessings ventured into serious Elizabeth Berg wish-fulfillment territory. Here we see Quindlen returning to the kind of emotional complexity that made her famous. So even if Every Last One wasn't every thing I wanted it to be, it was nice to know that the old Anna was returning to the fore. I hope she stays right there, and leaves the sweetness and light to the authors who can't do dark and bittersweet the way that she does.

Every Last One is not a perfect novel--it's not even a perfect Quindlen novel--but it's good enough. If you've already read Joyce Carol Oates's We Were the Mulvaneys, and you want more in the same vein, this book is for you. If you haven't, go and read the Oates first. And then after you love it and want more, come back to this one.

Rating: 3 of 5 stars