2023/039: Still Alive — Eleanor Lerman

The moon was hidden behind clouds that lay on the sky like hooks, waiting to snag the stars.  Down the block, beyond the boardwalk, I could hear the ocean chewing up the shore. [p. 365]

I'm confused by Eleanor Lerman: I thought I'd wishlisted her works having read and loved at least one of them, but evidence suggests that this is actually the first novel I've read by her. I liked it very much, though, and will read more of her work.

Jessie, who works at a New York restaurant called Vampire's and lives with her Russian girlfriend Rita in a beachside town on Long Island, is surprised to get a phone call from a schoolteacher in Minnesota saying that her long-lost stepsister Jackie has been found: or, more accurately, that the remains of a murdered woman have been identified as Jackie. Jessie blames Jackie (who was schizophrenic) for her estrangement from her father, and for the breakup of the family: she has coped, all these years, by becoming the person who keeps others safe. Her brother Rob has coped by becoming the producer of a wildly popular TV show called Trackdown, which aims to reunite missing persons with their families and loved ones. Neither Jessie nor Rob is especially convinced by the schoolteacher's account or her 'evidence', but obviously they can't just ignore the situation.

But Jackie's fate is not the focus of the novel. It's more about Jessie's everyday life as a forty-something queer Jewish working-class woman: her relationship with Rita, her friendship with Malcolm, her affection for her brother, her gradual realisation that Jackie's lack of medical treatment, rather than Jackie herself, was the problem. There's a strong sense of community, of found family as well as birth family. Lerman is an astute observer of the details that bring a character -- or a place -- to life.

The novel doesn't really end, per se: there is no closure. (I did think the title might be a spoiler, but it's something that a medium told one of the family after Jackie's disappearance. Jessie does visit the same psychic, but seems disinclined to believe what she's told, though it seems to me ... well.) There is a missing person who's found, and there is a crisis which is overcome. But the pleasure of this novel, for me, was in the characters, and in Lerman's prose, which -- despite the lack of proofreading and the fact that, halfway through, the novel goes into italic font and never escapes -- is distinctive and warm and very readable.