Every Last One

April 12, 2010
In her latest, Quindlen (Rise and Shine) once again plumbs the searing emotions of ordinary people caught in tragic circumstances. Mary Beth Latham is a happily married woman entirely devoted to her three teenaged children. When her talented daughter Ruby casually announces she's breaking up with her boyfriend Kirenan, a former neighbor who's become like family, Mary Beth is slightly alarmed, but soon distracted by her son Max, who's feeling overshadowed by his extroverted, athletic twin brother Alex. Quindlen's novel moves briskly, propelled by the small dramas of summer camp, proms, soccer games and neighbors, until the rejected Kirenan blindsides the Lathams, and the reader, with an incredible act of violence. Left with almost nothing, Mary Beth struggles to cope with loss and guilt, protect what she has left, and regain a sense of meaning. Quindlen is in classic form, with strong characters and precisely cadenced prose that builds in intensity.

April 15, 2010
Essayist and novelist Quindlen (Good Dog. Stay., 2007, etc.) tosses a grenade of murderous mayhem into the middle of an otherwise standard-issue novel of manners about an upper-middle-class community in Vermont.

Mary Beth Latham, who runs a landscaping business, and her eye-doctor husband Glen are the parents of 14-year-old twins Alex and Max and 17-year-old Ruby. The first half of the novel is Mary Beth's self-deprecating yet vaguely self-congratulatory narration of her family's life. Mary Beth's marriage to dull but decent Glen continues on middle-aged simmer. Soccer star Alex is as popular in his way as self-confident iconoclast Ruby, who is past her little bout of anorexia. Only Max, geeky and socially awkward, seems to be struggling. Although he does seem to like his therapist—by coincidence a specialist in twins and a twin himself—his only friend is Ruby's boyfriend Kiernan. But Ruby has outgrown Kiernan, who continues to hang around the house mooning after her and adopting the Lathams as a surrogate family since his own parents' nasty divorce. Mary Beth deals with small business crises and her Mexican workman. She and her friends commiserate over their children, although not their marriages, in admirable if not quite believable rectitude. Then Kiernan, whose mental problems Mary Beth has either missed or ignored, although they'll seem pretty apparent to the reader, goes berserk and commits a horrendous act of violence against Mary Beth's family. Only Mary Beth and Alex survive, and the remainder of the book details their road to emotional recovery. Unfortunately, while Quindlen's a pro at writing about the quotidian details in the life of a bourgeois Everywoman like Mary Beth, the actual plot is hard to swallow. The murders are too obviously meant to shock. Mary Beth's guilt over a brief affair she had with Kiernan's womanizing dad years ago rings false. And the outpouring of support she receives from friends and family is too saccharinely redemptive.

An unsatisfying mix of melodrama and the mundane.

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March 15, 2010
Unforeseen catastrophe and how we cope with it is fictions raison detre, yet few novelists can turn the innocent before and the shattered after into fiction as accessible, specific, authentic, graceful, touching, and radiant as Quindlens. In her sixth magnetizing novel, we know early on that something horrible is going to happen in the Latham household, which we experience through the keen senses and swirling thoughts of Mary Beth. Contentedly married to an ophthalmologist (an ironic profession, given how many clues to the impending tragedy she and her husband fail to see), she runs a landscape design business and attends ardently to her children: beautiful and creative teen Ruby, and slightly younger twin sons, who are so unalike they barely seem related. Kiernan, Rubys boyfriend, is also an integral part of the hectic, happy household. Mary Beths narrative voice is not only reliable but also irresistible, and after she survives the unthinkable, her struggle to reconstruct her life evolves into a penetrating inquiry into the bewilderment of grief. But for all of Quindlens bold and invaluable insights into anguish and recovery, what stands out most are her charming and insightful portrayals of mercurial, marvelous teenagers, her fluency in the complexity of family dynamics, and her deep understanding of mother love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)