I kept getting the strange sense of unchecked privilege while reading Matthew Thomas' We Are Not Ourselves. I wondered, is this intentional? I'll never know for sure, but I do know that the good review given to Thomas' novel in the NY Times continues another tradition of unchecked privilege - undue accolades for white male writers.
Eileen Tumulty is the daughter of Irish American immigrants. Her father tells her, after she confesses frustration over her fiancee's refusal to wear her expensive and engraved wedding gift of a gold watch to him, that he can't appreciate fine things because he is from a multiple-generation American family that doesn't own a house. This solidifies in Eileen the core value that nice things, property most of all, are meaningful and essential.
Later in the story, she grows to loathe her neighborhood - the diversifying Queens, NYC of the 1970s - for the increasing number of non-Western European immigrants. Later still, she glibly recalls being harder on an African-American nursing student because things would be tougher for her in their shared profession, anyway.
Eileen is not entirely unlikable - but her unchecked racism and classism erected a barrier between us (me, the reader, and her, the protagonist) that I couldn't quite get cross. I also could not muster much sympathy for her son, the horrifically irresponsible and unreliable son who avoids dealing with his father's long-suffering illness and death.
Further, the overarching storyline - husband's ironic, early onset Alzheimer's unravels everything this first/second-generation family has built in America - was overly familiar, as Lisa Genovese's Still Alice did it (college professor with Alzheimer's) first, and too recently.
Still, this book was so long, that by the time I realized I was only halfway through, I was committed to finishing it. Mare Winningham's incomparably beautiful narration is the current that kept me afloat.
3 out of 10. CAKB.
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