Why do we continue to love the people who have hurt us the most? Those who have broken their promises, walked away from their responsibilities and scarred us with their words or fists? These are some of the questions at the heart of Jami Attenberg’s fifth novel, All This Could Be Yours, a title which, by the end, feels more like a threat than an aspiration.
Attenberg has written about dysfunctional families before – one of her earlier works, The Middlesteins, is a fine study of how one falls apart when a father decides that he’s had enough of his wife and simply walks away. In this book she has created a cast of characters so cold that one comes away from it feeling they would be more suited for a horror novel than a dramatic one.
The story is set over a few days, when the patriarch of the Tuchman family, Victor, is taken ill and his wife and children gather to say their goodbyes. Victor is a despicable creature, ruthless, bullying and violent, a man who has spent a lifetime physically and emotionally abusing his loved ones, to the point where they’re now wondering whether to mourn his passing or hang out the bunting. Although Attenberg is vague on what Victor has done in his life to make so much money, it seems that he has been some sort of real-estate wheeler and dealer, an inveterate cheat, a dishonest broker, and a man without any moral compass.
One would naturally feel sympathy for Barbara, his wife, and Alex and Gary, his children, if they did not come across as equally ghastly, although, of course, they are what he has turned them into. Barbara has spent decades enduring and defending her husband’s viciousness and infidelities, apparently content to live with them if his business continues to fund her extravagant lifestyle. She comes from a generation that believes a man has the right to treat his wife as his personal chattel and his actions never affect her love for him, which remains constant. Towards the end of the book, checking her diamond-encrusted Piaget watch, she shrugs off his many cruelties by thinking that “he had been good with presents, she’ll give him that, that ghost. Payoffs were his speciality”.
Reading Barbara’s self-justifications reminded me of Tony Soprano’s wife Carmela, a woman who liked to believe that she was more virtuous than those around her but for whom money and status mattered more than anything. Indeed, that show is referenced in the novel, for Victor is a huge fan and possibly models himself after the conscience-free New Jersey Mafioso.
Only one character, Victor and Barbara’s son Gary, comes across as decent, but even his halo slips a little when we learn that he has spent 15 years reading his wife’s diary in order to understand what she wants from life, and then providing it in order that she might continue to love him. It’s a tragic existence and one that, ultimately, offers him no joy. The most distant character in the novel, he’s also the most damaged.
Quietly angry
All This Could Be Yours is a quietly angry novel, a story of three people who are so broken that they’ve resigned themselves to never finding peace. They get on with their lives but keep a distance from each other, knowing that to start a conversation about the brutalities that have been inflicted upon them is to begin an argument that will have no resolution. One of the great frustrations of the book is that Victor spends most of it lying in a coma, unable to hear the bitter accusations that finally come his way. There is no moment of confrontation, no purgative scene that might allow the reader to feel that he is being punished for his behaviour. It’s a brave tactic on the author’s part, choosing authenticity over catharsis. After all, this, more often than not, is life.
Attenberg has a terrific eye for family dynamics, even if one is left feeling despondent about how the worst people often suffer no consequences. Her great skill as a novelist is recognising the difference between festering wounds and those that have been stitched up years before but have left small scars upon the skin that can burst open and haemorrhage with a single ill-advised remark.
John Boyne's 18th novel, A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom, will be published in July by Doubleday
