Immediate Family

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Jeff Ferrell described this as “cultural criminalisation”, as the media manipulated public conceptions of cultural works, delegitimising artists like Mann, despite legal actions never being having brought against her. He is a young, handsome stranger on paper, with a calm that can perhaps be attributed to being twenty-two. As the narrator tries to figure out what she wants to say in her speech she tells the story of their family. We looked up at the trees and though it saddened me to see them in bloom the breeze seemed to air out my insides.

Powerful vignettes, such as memories of Danny being bullied as a child for looking different, blend with musings about the history of transracial adoption, Victorian literature, and famous adoptees.The narrator also lays bare her struggles with infertility and describes her ambivalent feelings about adoption (“The fact that I could do this felt both convenient and questionable”). In describing a young woman talking to the narrator's husband at a party: “Her hands were thrust coolly in her pockets, as if pinning her otherwise weightless frame to the earth. This question also puzzles the novel's narrator, a woman in her 30s addressing her younger brother - adopted from Thailand as a toddler - who is about to get married. Despite the counselors, the conferences, the paperwork, the questions we asked you directly, it was hard to understand how feelings got processed.

This explains why everything is blurred except for a tomato on the table, hence the photograph's title. There is, however, a downside to these digressions: though always informative and often delightful, the passages may slow the reader’s momentum.

It’s no small feat that Levy manages to hold all of these elements in the frame of the speech; the smooth flights may remind readers of Donald Antrim’s novels.

IMMEDIATE FAMILY by Ashley Nelson Levy is my last read of 2021 and unfortunately I didn’t care for it. I would easily agree to read a sequel of this book—maybe one from the perspective of Danny to the narrator this time. But more than that, the letter details secrets she has kept, about the struggles she and her husband have experienced with fertility and the strains that is causing on their marriage. We’re made most human by these visions, in how limited or expansive a life’s story can become, the conviction with which we believe things should or might or did happen, and in all the ways we get it wrong. It tells stories about insect stings, sun-kissed lunches, familial devotion, and the transformative power of nature.

The plot doesn't rise and fall so much as it ebbs and flows, and the ending, almost anticlimactic in its quietude, carries the story out to sea. Immediate Family is, in essence, a long letter from the narrator to her brother, chronicling their relationship as they grew older and the frictions their family experienced. An intimate look at siblings’ relationships, what makes them love each other and what the foundations of that relationship is. I wasn’t allowed to shower but was embarrassed to go into work in the morning with the slick sheen of my hair. His greatest concern is keeping his men safe, a group of men who are younger than our twenty-two-year-old father.

So much of the filler and scholarship and repetition would have been in the pail on the first draft, and the perplexity over its form resolved. All our loves, traumas, celebrations, and pet peeves are informed by uncountable preexisting circumstances and expectations that collect and simmer over lifetimes, yielding much of the psychological stew that makes up who we are.This is an interesting and emotional story, but because it’s told in the second person, it often feels like you’re viewing it from a distance. Why, in a literary tradition filled with orphans and abandoned children, had I never encountered such an honest, loving, and at times painful portrayal of adoption before? By working collaboratively with her children Mann uses these idealised family photos to create a narrative from her children's perspectives. I liked the feeling that we were all banded together against something while we waited, even in our silence.