All Adults Here (2020)
By Emma Straub
Riverhead Books, 368 pages.
★★★ ½
In books with titles such as All Adults Here, smart money is that grownups will be AWOL. In Emma Straub’s new novel, most of the characters are legally adults, but it speaks volumes when an 8th grader is more mature than most of them.
All Adults Here opens with two crises. Widowed Astrid Strick is jolted into rethinking her golden years priorities when she witnesses a school bus fatally strike Barbara Baker. It rattles her even though she didn’t even like Barbara. Shortly thereafter, her granddaughter Cecelia is sent to live with her, after being bullied at her Brooklyn school by a former friend and her rich parents. Cecelia actually did a good thing, but add those rich parents to the list of adults behaving like children. Cecelia loves her “gamma,” but she doesn’t know anyone her own age in Clapham, a close-knit Hudson River town north of Poughkeepsie. (It’s fictional, though it bears similarities to Rhinebeck.)
Astrid, 68, has been having a closeted relationship with her hairdresser Birdie and has been contemplating coming out to her three adult children. It might have happened sooner had they not been so deep into extended adolescence. Oldest son Elliot is married to Wendy Chan, a lawyer, who put her career on hold to care for their twins. He is a developer with megalomaniacal dreams who immerses himself in work, and is hellbent on proving his manhood. Daughter Porter has a goat cheese enterprise but no partner, so she decides to have an in vitro impregnation. Astrid’s youngest, Nicky and his French wife Juliette, are Cecelia’s parents. Nicky is a heartthrob who was once in movies, but now he and Juliette are quasi-hippies who are more like friends to their daughter, who’d actually like less empathy and more help in growing up.
Other important characters include August, whom Cecelia befriends, and whose parents are a bit like Nicky and Juliette in their laissez-faire parenting skills; and Rachel, a past and renewed friend of Porter’s. Clapham also functions as a character. It is insular, but in a way in which locals fret over preserving its uniqueness rather than closing the gates. Such places lend themselves to a soap opera treatment; locales seeking to put a cloth over the clock generally have things going on under the covers. In addition to Astrid’s relationship with Birdie, Porter has been sleeping with Jeremy, her high school boyfriend who is married with two children; Rachel’s husband left her for a younger woman; Wendy is losing patience with Elliot, who seems perpetually pissed off at everyone. At times it feels as if All Adults Here is an updated Peyton Place.
The novel has been branded as a mother-daughter book and women’s literature. It is certainly true that Straub celebrates female resourcefulness and that men often appear as predators, libertines, or jerks, but this is not a work one should derisively dismiss as “chick lit.” Straub has something a bit weightier in play. Her female characters don’t have their lives in order either. Porter is a wonderful aunt to Cecelia, but her own life is a shamble. Astrid is conflicted over things to the point of paralysis, Wendy was content to act as a perfect bourgeois wife before she cracked, Jeremy’s wife Kristen is anything but a walking poster for sisterhood, and her daughter Sidney is a little shit.
My major criticism of the novel is that Straub mechanistically ticks politically correct boxes, even if they’re not crucial to the novel. Vivian is Chinese American, Birdie is Latina, August is gender fluid, Porter’s obstetrician is African American, and Astrid and Birdie are lesbians. One way of looking at this is to note that even small-town America is diverse; another is to say that Straub undermines the world she built. Much of Clapham’s insularity vanishes in a matter of weeks, which is not the way change usually occurs. There are dollops of tokenism throughout, as the novel’s diversity is surface deep. Vivian could have been Australian, Birdie Icelandic, August a burly football star, and the doctor green with yellow polka dots and it would not have mattered.
All Adults Here is a coming-of-age tale for its central characters. Who says that such a story must be about adolescents? Can Astrid’s brood come to terms with their lives? She gave each what she thought they needed but apparently, she bred hurt and/or resentment–except for Nicky, a man-child, whom everyone loves in the way they’d love a large puppy. Even cute puppies must eventually become dogs. Straub suggests that until adulthood happens, parents risk passing their failings to their offspring.
Rob Weir
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