At first glance, Emily’s privileged Connecticut upbringing might seem familiar. These are the quietly dysfunctional suburbs that haven’t changed all that much since Cheever. Emily’s remote father is a Lehman Brothers muckety-muck who spends his time “sequestered in the basement with a phone and a new computer that virtually connected him to any part of the world he wanted, except the upstairs of our house.” As freshmen in high school, Emily and her friends nurse crushes on boys, dissect fetal pigs, ask silly questions in sex ed and try not to think too deeply about too much. “If we had religious thoughts,” she says, “they were only worries that we would die while wearing our retainers and then have to wear them for the rest of eternity.” Emily is a fresh, funny observer of adolescent social customs, and Espach gives her high school material a likably dense, spiky texture.
Emily’s problems deepen when her parents divorce and her lonely mother starts boozing it up. Worse yet, Emily is unfortunate enough to witness the suicide of the man who lives next door. That unhappy man’s son is Emily’s best friend and romantic interest — and Emily’s father is inconveniently having an affair with the neighbor’s wife. Lastly, in case this isn’t enough in the way of complications, Emily embarks on an affair with a young teacher, despite the principal’s stern announcement that their high school has become a “Hug-Free Zone” to avoid any whiff of sexual implication.
In recounting this affair, Espach is at her best, capturing both the erotic appeal of Emily’s initiation — and her terror, along with her queasy, inchoate sense of being wronged. As Emily’s father sighs when he finally learns about the affair, “Sometimes I feel like I know exactly who you are, and sometimes, I confess, I have no idea.”
As “The Adults” moves along, Espach makes large leaps between periods in Emily’s life. This kinetic, disjointed style has been popularized by several other successful books about young adults, most notably Dave Eggers’s “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” and Marisha Pessl’s “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”: odd, fey chapter titles and the stray numbered list. In general, Espach makes good use of the approach, although some readers may find her style of omitting material mannered or jarring. Emily’s college years, for example, are barely mentioned, and she decides to become an interior designer without ever having shown a split second of interest in a building or object. (Actually, she sounds a lot more like someone who would major in creative writing.)
But then Espach isn’t aiming to deliver a strictly realistic, fully delineated character study. “The Adults” is less a piece of cultural anthropology than a jaunty tone poem about the indeterminate years of young adulthood. As Emily so aptly describes the protracted adolescence of the contemporary American child, “I felt like a semisolid, like I was melting, or just about to harden.”
Zeidner’s last novel was “Layover.” She directs the MFA program in creative writing at Rutgers University in Camden, N.J.
THE ADULTS
By Alison Espach
Scribner. 307 pp. $25
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