THE LATECOMER (2022)
By Jean Hanff Korelitz
Celadon Books, 440 pages.
★★★★
Jean Hanff Korelitz scores again with The Latecomer. As in her previous novel, The Plot, she throws us into circumstances muddied by murky morality. It unfolds in three acts that take us from 1972-2017. In an unusual twist, Phoebe Oppenheimer, the book’s namesake latecomer, narrates events from before she was born.
How many life decisions have their genesis in a single action? In Act I, Solomon “Salo” Oppenheimer, a 20-year-old Cornell student, has an auto accident in which two are killed and a third, Stella Western, an African American woman, is seriously injured. How do you put such a horrifying event behind you? If you have a conscience, you don’t; you merely move forward. Salo marries Johanna Hirsch, who wants children, but it’s just not happening. After several years, Johanna opts for in vitro fertilization and one of her frozen eggs bears fruit–in a big way. Suddenly, she is the mother of triplets: Sally, Lewyn, and Harrison. Salo, though, is more cut out to be a recluse. He comes from money, makes even more in financial services, and impulsively buys a Cy Twombly painting for reasons he can’t explain. It becomes his entrée into Outsider art–including Henry Darger and Achilles Rizzoli–which he collects and stores in a warehouse that his family doesn’t know about. They think his relative absence from their big house in Brooklyn Heights is work-related.
The kids are definitely not all right. The triplets positively despise each other, show little deference to either parent, and lack empathy. The children imagine themselves as the equivalent of Outsider art. Actually, they replicate parental patterns: each preps at the “progressive” school their parents once attended and at which Johanna works, two end up at Cornell, and none connect family money to the unorthodox lives they seek to build.
Part II follows the triplets’ college years. Sally and Lewyn live in adjacent dorms at Cornell, but never even acknowledge knowing one another. That’s awkward when Lewyn begins to date Sally’s roommate Rochelle Steiner, on whom Sally also has a crush. Good luck keeping those secrets! More weirdness abides. Though he is Jewish, Lewyn contemplates becoming a Mormon like his roommate, and Sally puts Cornell in the rearview mirror to become a furniture picker like an older woman with whom she informally interned. Harrison attends an alternative school in New Hampshire, where he becomes a devotee of Eli Absalom Stone, whom he views as a genius and defends in a school contretemps turned tempest. Stone identifies as black, an ambiguous claim. He and Harrison yearn to be conservative intellectuals, attend the Hayek Institute*, and act like Tucker Carlsons-in-training. As Phoebe put it, “Harrison lived on the Upper East Side but traveled constantly in his noxious mission to make the world awful.”
The Oppenheimer marriage collapses when Salo reconnects with Stella, fathers Ephraim, and announces he’s leaving his wife. This (eventually) sets the stage for Act III. Johanna uses another stored embryo to bring Phoebe into the world 19 years after the triplets. Johanna rationalizes that the family that she thought she wanted was never really a family at all. And how! Phoebe’s voice dominates the third section.
There’s a lot in this novel: 9/11, visions of what a post-racial society might look like, hoarding, blurred lines between invention and fraud, imagining ethnic reassignment, legal battles, fourth-wave feminism, the gap between what is said and inferred, and things that can be forgiven and those that are what they are. Although the novel’s ending ties loose ends too neatly, Korelitz doesn’t offer instant character redemption. That would be inconsistent in a work in which loners struggle to change their ways. The very constancy of fully realized characters helps explain dysfunctionality Oppenheimer-style.
Korelitz deftly interweaves thematic contrasts. The most obvious is the tension between progressive and hard right politics, but you might ponder, for instance, the gulf between the art Salo collected and the Shaker furniture that Sally salvaged. I admired Korelitz’s courage to dive into treacherous cultural war waters. The Latecomer runs the risk of angering the woke and the deliberately non-woke. It’s as if she’s telling us that any of us would be best rendered as an Outsider portrait.
Rob Weir
*Friedrich Hayek (1889-92) was an influential free-market economist. His staunch belief that government should remain neutral in economic matters, should not artificially manipulate “natural” interest rates, or engage in New Deal-like spending has made him a posthumous neo-conservative icon.
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