Review: Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

It's Labor Day 1976. Fern and Edgar Keating are ready to enjoy the last bits of summer on Martha's Vineyard with their three children. But they receive news that will change everything for their family--their money is all gone. The two parents have a huge fight when Fern assumes that Edgar will abandon his dream of being a writer in order to work with his father and support their family. Each parent runs from the conflict and the pressure of finding a solution, both assuming that the children are safe with the other. Cricket, James, and Will are left to find their own way.

Ramona Ausubel is one of my favorite authors. Her novel No One Is Here Except All of Us and short story collection A Guide to Being Born are two of my favorite books, so I was willing to follow her anywhere. In fact I bought this book in hardcover before reading it, which is a unique occurrence for this girl who usually reads and then buys. It's an even greater testament to her writing because this is not the kind of book that I would usually pick up. I tend to avoid stories of sad rich people because well, they are just not that applicable to my life and I find many of their problems obnoxious. But Ramona Ausubel has achieved some sort of literary miracle here. This whole story is about people whose lives are upended when the money runs out. Not only that, but they are parents who abandon their children. And yet I was fascinated by their lives and even sympathetic to their struggles.

The reason this book works so well is that it is the story of a relationship. In much the same way that last year's juggernaut Fates and Furies carefully revealed the inner workings of a couple, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty shows how Fern and Edgar came together and how their very different families impacted the way they approached marriage and parenthood. Ausubel writes with equal grace and insight from the perspective of unfulfilled Fern, lonely Edgar, and Cricket trying to keep everything together in the absence of her parents. It's difficult to say if the writing or the characterization is the star here, but it's certain that the book is one to savor.

Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty
By Ramona Ausubel
Riverhead Books June 2016
320 pages
From my shelves

Review: A Guide to Being Born

A Guide to Being Born: Stories

By Ramona Ausubel 

Riverhead Books 2013

195 pages

From the library

A Guide to Being Born is a short story collection that ponders the ways we love each other and how our lives are affected by major events like births and deaths. As in her novel No One is Here Except All of Us, Ausubel weaves together the mundane with the fantastic. We meet a woman named Alice who suddenly finds herself adrift on a cargo ship with other elderly ladies, a young boy who is frustrated that his parents are more interested in each other than in the death of his cat, and a family dealing with the death of its matriarch in very different and terrible ways.

It's easy to finish a book and say that you enjoyed it. I did enjoy some of the stories in here, but there were also some that made me uncomfortable, some that made me mad, and some that made me feel like grieving right along with the characters. I think this is the measure of a good short story collection and a good writer - Ausubel has written very different stories, but managed to produce a strong reaction in the reader with each one.

This book is separated into four sections - Birth, Gestation, Conception, and Love. Aubusbel is an author who surprises, though. Her first story is not, as you might expect, about a happy family who has just received a little bundle of joy. Instead, it's about an elderly woman at the end of her life, preparing to embark on a sort of rebirth as her family makes the difficult decision to take her off of life support. These tales also have elements of magic woven throughout. This writer seems particularly interested in physical manifestations of emotions as evidenced in the society where people grow an extra arm for every time they fall in love and the soon-to-be father who sprouts drawers out of his chest.

My favorite of the collection was the second story, entitled Poppyseed. It tells the story of small family - Roger, Laura, and their daughter Poppy. Roger works as the head guide of a ghost tour on an ocean liner and Laura stays home with Poppy, their beloved daughter who is eight years old but will never walk or talk on her own. The parents are struggling with the possibility of medically stunting their daughter's growth so that she will never have to deal with changes to her body that her mind cannot understand. This story broke my heart and I had a moment when you finish a story and you just sit, amazed by what you have experienced.

The best indicator of this book's effect on me though is, that while I am sitting here and writing this review, I'm trying to figure out if I can read a few stories again before taking it back to the library. A Guide to Being Born, like any short story collection, will have some that become favorites and some that won't. But each story in this slim collection will make you feel something and stay with you after you have closed the book. 

Review: No One is Here Except All of Us

No One Is Here Except All of Us

By Ramona Ausubel

Riverhead February 2012

325 pages

From that library place 

Lena lives a life of contentment and routine with her brother, sister, and parents in her small Romanian village of Zalischik. Their isolation is so great that when word finally reaches them about the war through a mysterious refugee, it is too late to flee. Not knowing if their seclusion can save them, they decide to start over. Tomorrow will be the first day of the world. In the new world, there are no rules written. Spouses, children, and jobs can be exchanged. Beliefs can be rewritten. Can a new world save them from the horrors of the old world?

Have you ever listened to an incredibly beautiful piece of music where the meeting of hope and hopelessness actually made your heart hurt? Ramona Ausubel has written the prose version. As the reader, you know from the beginning that this can only end in tragedy. But the hope of these people and their faith in the world they have created makes a believer out of you as well.

This is, obviously, a novel about the power of story. Story can quite literally change your life. In this case, the story is a little fantastic. While it doesn’t cross over into real magical territory, there is a feeling that things can happen in this created world that might not occur in the normal world. Story becomes a collective history, a way to connect with people in your past and your future.

“Even though you have only been alive a few days, your story, our story, started a long time ago. Ours is a story I know, both the parts I saw with my eyes and the parts I did not. This kind of knowing comes from somewhere in my bones, somewhere in my heart. Someday, your children will ask what happened, and you will tell a new version, and this way, the story will keep living. Truth is not in the facts. The truth is in the telling…”

The characters in this novel are beautifully rendered. Although Lena is the main character, this book is so much about the concept of community and family. Each relationship is beautiful and heartbreaking – parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers new and old, friends and neighbors. Connection has never been more important or more fragile.

No One Is Here Except All of Us is a little bit of poetry and a little bit of magic interwoven with a beautiful story with memorable characters. This tale will make you smile and make you cry, often on the same page. These people and their stories will resonate with your heart for a long time.