Close Relations by Susan Isaacs

My mom and I discovered Susan Isaacs a few years when I picked up Any Place I Hang My Hat: A Novel , which we both read and liked. After that, I eagerly picked up After All These Years: A Novel and Past Perfect: A Novel , and thought they were fresh, fun, and a literary step above your average "chick lit" novel.

Then I started going back to Isaacs' earlier work, reading Compromising Positions and now Close Relations . And I am befuddled.

In fairness, let's keep in mind that Close Relations is my age, i.e. it's 30 years old. So I tried to make allowances for the protagonist, 35-year-old Marcia, because I figured, hey, being a working woman in 1980 New York City is obviously different than 2010 Baltimore. Marcia's a speechwriter working for a New York candidate for governor, and the least dated part of the book is the political aspect (turns out the 'average man' theme for a candidate was as appealing in 1980 as it is today).

The rest of the book, all I can say is oy. The major theme of the novel is how pushy one's relatives are when it comes to marriage, especially if you're Jewish, divorced, in your 30s, and don't have children. This is not unfamiliar ground. But there's pushy, and then there's the caricatures Marcia's relatives become in this novel. And I never quite figured out why Marcia's mother was so uniformly awful with no redeeming qualities, other than a vague belief that perhaps she was depressed, and that maybe Jewish families in 1980 didn't whip out their DSM-IV to diagnose obnoxious relatives.

And the sex! I understand that 1980s New York City women were unaware of the impending AIDS crisis, and that women were still figuring out the whole liberation thing, but why oh why does Marcia sleep with so many men who are terrible to her?

Anyway, I would recommend picking up Isaacs' later work over Close Relations , although perhaps this one should be assigned to a gender studies class. It's also not a terrible choice for a book club, as it is sure to provoke an interesting discussion.