... a very good novel about a very bad man ... is least satisfying when it comes to the terrible things Victor has done, the details of which are teased and promised and hinted at and revealed a little at a time, whereas I think they’d have been more terrifying if they’d just been stated outright, so that we could fully appreciate how they’ve affected everyone else ... the novel’s through line in lesser hands this might be static. But Attenberg gets so deep into the psyches of her characters that the story ends up seeming electric with ruin, and with possible resurrection ... is full of hope — but...the novel is most powerful when it’s in honest open battle with that which makes hope so difficult in the first place.
Weaving together a riotous assortment of threads—the stories of three generations of Tuchmans as well as a smattering of other characters pulled into their orbit—Attenberg tenderly mines their family history and massive dysfunction not for clues as to what created the monstrous Victor but for what a monster can create in spite of himself. Her characters—flawed, defensive, overwhelmed and frequently endearing—fizz off the page. Their inner lives coalesce beautifully into a funny and heart-stirring tribute to the nutty inscrutability of belonging to a family.
... Attenberg secures her place as an oddly sparkling master of warped family sagas ... Why should we be interested in reading about such an unequivocally bad person? For starters, because Attenberg's writing is full of brio ... Attenberg's prose is never limp or tepid, though she occasionally over-reaches ... Attenberg serves up a brutal portrait of a brutal man ... orchestrated with the precision of an opera on a revolving stage ... Attenberg brings air into this potentially suffocating story with wit, and with occasional digressions into some of the peripheral people the Tuchmans encounter without a thought as they move around post-Katrina New Orleans ... Initially jarring, these reminders that the people who make the city run have their own histories and troubles underscore the fact that life can be challenging. But they also reassure us of the possibility of not just good in this world but decency.
Her secondary cast gives Attenberg a chance to dwell on other aspects of human nature, opportunities for humor, and more access to the New Orleans setting ... Attenberg is on a roll. Her last book, All Grown Up, about a happily single woman in New York, was my favorite of her novels, and now All This Could Be Yours has nabbed its title. Its combination of ambitious scope and economical treatment, its spirit of unsentimental generosity, recall the divine Grace Paley, a comparison Attenberg has inspired more than once.
Attenberg’s seventh work of fiction is experienced mostly through Alex, Barbra, and Twyla, each one a terrifically nuanced character that’s nearly impenetrable to the others yet intoxicatingly available to readers. As the story unfolds largely over a single day, memories are purged and bombshells dropped, not to mention the ever-curious matter of the vexing central character rendered mute for the duration. Attenberg writes with a deeply human understanding of her characters, and the fact that, when it comes to family, things are rarely well enough to leave alone.
Toggling back and forth through perspectives and time, Attenberg gives each character their own rich history, making even tertiary ones — a Pilates instructor, a CVS clerk, a world-weary coroner — come fantastically alive, sometimes in just a single line. New Orleans, too, is its own protagonist: a place of sticky booze and Spanish moss and endless, swampy heat that also knows its own clichés, inside and out.
Attenberg’s attention to detail zooms in on the interpersonal relationships that are either nurtured or fractured between different pairings of people ... One microscopic flaw of this novel is the point of view transitions. Readers are able to see into the thoughts of random characters — some are inconsequential and seem almost arbitrary — and some of them turn out to be tangentially connected to the core family ... Attenberg — quite beautifully, in fact — lets us know this family is not all bruises and dark spots.
While readers take a detailed tour through the Tuchmans' post-traumatic stress responses, some of the most intimate moments feature fleeting strangers...These peaks into the thoughts of strangers mostly serve to underscore the theme of the family's isolation, as others attempts at communication with them fail time and again. A few of these glimpses into their lives don't quite work, and they are uneven in length and depth ... The reader is left hoping that the third generation of Tuchmans has escaped the traumas of toxic patriarchy within their family. By extension, if our society decides to reckon with the power of 'bad men', perhaps we can escape the cycle, as well.
Jami Attenberg always creates characters that feel so real you can almost touch them, and in All This Could Be Yours, she does it again ... Thoughtful and smart, All This Could Be Yours is a novel that begs to be discussed.
There is much trauma and regret to sift through...though author Jami Attenberg’s wordplay, wit and dark humor makes that a more pleasurable experience than most could manage ... Attenberg is also a masterful psychoanalyst, crafting characters whose mental and emotional journeys surprise even as they make perfect intuitive sense. She doesn’t flinch from digging into life’s messiness, pressing gently but resolutely into wounds to see what oozes out. There’s big stuff, like acrimonious divorce, trust-shattering affairs, sexual and psychological abuse. But it’s the small stuff – insecurity, lost youth, everyday loneliness – that quietly devastates ... an emotionally messy novel, but precise in craft. The narrative voice is complex and profound, jumping from head to head, consciousness to consciousness, inhabiting main characters and peripheral figures alike. Attenberg writes with care about even the most glancing characters.
[Attenberg] often writes about family relationships in all their complexity, and in All This Could Be Yours she does so with mordant humor and painful clarity ... In chapters that focus on one character at a time, Attenberg takes us inside the family’s history from different angles to create an in-depth portrait ... Victor Tuchman may be a 'monster,' as his wife thinks, with a few last blows to deal before he dies, but the story of his family’s survival is engrossing.
Victor, characterized by size, violence and mysteriousness, is more an archetype than a vivid presence on the page. Gary, anguished by wife Twyla’s betrayal, is also more opaquely drawn than his mother and sister ... Attenberg takes advantage of the lush city and its remarkable heat, its river, the splendor of its tourism industry. Most of the characters are either visitors or outsiders: Even Gary and Twyla, who live there, are from other places. Sharon, the coroner who examines Victor’s body, is one of the few people who have spent most of their lives in the city, who have a relationship with it beyond that of a spectator. Sharon has a brief cameo at the beginning of the novel and a spectacular section toward the end ... a captivating, gothic short story tucked inside the novel — and this shift in voice and perspective displays the range of Attenberg’s considerable skill.
... [Attenberg] has created a cast of characters so cold that one comes away from it feeling they would be more suited for a horror novel than a dramatic one ... a quietly angry novel, a story of three people who are so broken that they’ve resigned themselves to never finding peace ... One of the great frustrations of the book is that Victor spends most of it lying in a coma, unable to hear the bitter accusations that finally come his way. There is no moment of confrontation, no purgative scene that might allow the reader to feel that he is being punished for his behaviour. It’s a brave tactic on the author’s part, choosing authenticity over catharsis. After all, this, more often than not, is life ... Attenberg has a terrific eye for family dynamics, even if one is left feeling despondent about how the worst people often suffer no consequences. Her great skill as a novelist is recognising the difference between festering wounds and those that have been stitched up years before but have left small scars upon the skin that can burst open and haemorrhage with a single ill-advised remark.
... brilliant ... [Attenberg] serves up death with a dose of exquisitely articulated pain and dark humor ... The soundtrack is a succession of acerbic, tightly wound, mostly well-defended voices ... This is a fascinating novel, yet one of its strengths --- a sharp, eloquent omniscient narrator who fills us in on not only the family’s past, but what will happen years after Victor’s death --- may also be a flaw. Attenberg’s voice doesn’t disappear into her characters; it calls attention to itself, like a skillful raconteur who can’t resist the bon mot ... It’s witty and sad and incredibly smart, this voice, but in my view it gives the book a certain coolness, a distancing from the characters’ anguish. Sometimes it seems to belong to a person who uses humor and intellect as a defense against going deeper ... Still, Attenberg’s stylish prose is a pleasure.
Prickly and unsentimental, but never quite hopeless, Attenberg, poet laureate of difficult families, captures the relentlessly lonely beauty of being alive ... Not a gentle novel but a deeply tender one.
... dazzling ... Attenberg excels at revealing rich interior lives—not only for her main cast, but also for cameo characters—in direct, lucid prose. This is a delectable family saga.
