Debut novel is an affair to remember
It’s an old story, a family in crisis — maybe the oldest, if you start with Adam and Eve. The fallout of infidelity, its effect on spouses and children, the rending of bonds between all concerned? Been there, done that, in novels since the form took shape a few centuries ago. And in an era when half of all marriages fail, isn’t adultery old hat?
Not when the story’s being told freshly and with consummate skill, as it is in Julia Pierpont’s astonishingly precocious debut novel, Among the Ten Thousand Things. The book, which made news for having been sold at auction for six figures while the author was still in the MFA program at New York University, pulls off the difficult feat of making something old seem new again.
Part of the newness comes from Pierpont’s canny use of technology and pop-cultural tropes as narrative mechanisms. The extramarital affair between a successful New York City artist named Jack and a young woman is revealed when the latter sends a package of his printed (and sexually explicit) emails and chat logs to his wife, Deb. The package is intercepted, innocently, by their 11-year-old daughter, Kay, who promptly shares it with her 15-year-old brother, Simon, who just as promptly hands it off to their mother.
As it turns out, Deb is already aware of her husband’s escapades, having discovered them six months earlier, and has chosen, at least for the moment, to stay with him anyway, and not only out of sheer inertia. She likes being married, divorce is a nightmare, and there are the kids to consider, right?
Well, yes and no. After initially refusing to speak to his lecherous dad, the self-centered Simon proceeds to go on about his own teenage business, in which his hapless parents play essentially no part. And Kay, processing the news in her own eccentric fashion, launches into writing some pornographic “Seinfeld” fan fiction that, when discovered by her schoolmates, brings down a new host of unanticipated consequences.
But the shock of the new in Among the Ten Thousand Things comes less from its references to email and sitcoms than from its 28-year-old author’s profound grasp of family dynamics, from her expert ventriloquism (her shifting between the various characters’ voices and perspectives is distinct and assured) and from her structural boldness. The last includes a section in the center of the novel, “That Year and Those That Followed,” in which we learn what will happen to the family well into the future.
From a storytelling point of view, that is a huge risk — mainly because it robs the last third of the book of suspense — but it’s a signature move that gives this terrific novel the ring of an important new voice in American literary fiction. If there’s nothing new under the sun, what of it? Julia Pierpont shows here that familiar things can still look strange in the light of a waning moon.
Among the Ten Thousand Things
By Julia Pierpont
Random House, 336 pages, $26
3.5 stars out of four