This Family Is Miserable. You Should Meet Them Anyway.

by Jami Attenberg

If the characters in Jami Attenberg's novels existed on Google Maps, their collective pin would probably drop at a spot called Dysfunction Junction. The smart, deeply flawed people who populate her stories — usually Jewish and located somewhere within the urban flux of New York, Chicago or New Orleans — tend to be driven by art and ambition, along with infidelity, addiction and an almost pathological knack for family schisms. The urge to be likable does not consume them; one could say they are largely immune to the charms of being charming. But the texture of real, messy life lurks in the fallouts, failures and neuroses that spill across the page (and often down their throats; this gang like their alcohol).

The subjects of Attenberg's latest family vivisection, "A Reason to See You Again," are still marginally intact when we meet them in the suburbs of Chicago circa 1971. Rudy Cohen, the patriarch, is a sweet-tempered Holocaust survivor whose fragile health compels his anxious American wife, Frieda, to play constant nursemaid. And there's a familiar sibling yin and yang to their two daughters, the calm waters of 15-year-old Nancy — "Demure, pretty. Mildly interested in lots of things but not one thing especially" — balancing out the clever, congenitally intense Shelly, already a fierce presence at 12.

But a game of Saturday-night Scrabble reveals deeper fissures. Rudy, "daydreamy and faint and beautiful," is distracted by thoughts of his own private world, specifically the members-only club downtown where his lightly concealed homosexuality can roam free. And poor frizzy-haired Frieda can't even let her youngest daughter win, bumping the board with an accidentally-on-purpose elbow when Shelly puts down a triple word score.

Both girls are glad to put as many miles as they can between themselves and Frieda, whose grief — and the river of martinis and boxed wine on which she's riding it — has turned her raw and mean. ("In that era of their lives together, she could not see their value, only that they were sucking her dry. Where was her pleasure? Where was her joy?")

But no setting stays for long. Years pass like pages torn from a calendar in an old movie, a nearly four-decade dance of attachments and estrangements compressed in an hourglass. As the '80s dawn, Frieda moves to Miami — where at least there's sunshine, and men who share her fondness for rudderless days and supersize tumblers of vodka. Shelly lands a lucrative technology job in Seattle, and learns to embrace both the material perks of yuppiedom and a lopsided love affair with a man as driven and emotionally unavailable as she is.

Nancy also becomes a champion consumer, filling the series of bland short-term rentals she shares with Robby and their daughter, Jess, with the shiny flotsam of various mall jobs. Never mind that Robby has become the husband equivalent of an absentee landlord, and that Shelly, on a rare holiday stopover, blanches at her Christmas tree. Or that Jess, as she grows into her own muddled young womanhood, seems to absorb all kinds of lessons about the art of avoidance and self sabotage.

If this recap sounds like a giant pile of spoilers, I promise it's not, really. As in her previous novels "All Grown Up," "All This Could Be Yours" and maybe most famously "The Middlesteins," Attenberg is less interested in the mechanics of plot than in the emotional vectors between striving, imperfect people whose shared DNA is both the Maypole and the crucible (or whatever its Talmudic equivalent might be) they can't help forever circling.

She does all this with wry, streamlined wit and almost ruthless efficiency, distilling the essence of her characters and sometimes sealing their fate in the same paragraph. Even minor players are so sharply sketched that they feel immediately familiar, and the cultural markers ring true, too, from the crosscurrents of second- and third-wave feminism to the gold-rush opportunism of the early tech boom.

But the episodic nature of the narrative can also serve to distance and sometimes disengage the reader. Major moments — deaths, divorces, the collapse of a friendship — are deftly, often movingly captured, and then a few pages later, they're (literally) old news. It's a testament to Attenberg's gift for world-building that even the lovely, most likely temporary grace note that arrives in the final pages — reprieved at last, the miseries of this company! — somehow feels like a loss. From her, I'd take 10 more chapters of unhappily ever after.

| Jami Attenberg | Ecco | 230 pp. | $28