”This is Flusfeder’s masterpiece.” —Julie Myerson
New York City 1970: Emma Hoffman is the great party-giver of the Upper West Side. She’s a writer, wife, mother, hostess, guest, trying to excel and trying to find a way through the agonies and complacencies of it all – because at any moment something might fall, perhaps herself. Four years later, her son is going out alone into the streets of Manhattan on his eleventh birthday, to make himself new, and prove to be worthy of the birthday letters he continues to receive from his lost, soaring mother.
Something Might Fall is a kind of historical fiction, set in a moment when women’s literary voices were being heard in a new, confessional, intimate way, but the conditions of those writers’ relationships and their domestic obligations were not so different from those of their mothers. The first part, which swoops and stutters between Emma Hoffman and her husband, Dr Nicholas Sawyer, is about a woman at the edge of herself and is also an account of a marriage, embodying two consciousnesses in a mutual misunderstanding and disappointment and hope and sometimes magic. The second part is limited to just one point of view, of their son Nicky, the living in aftermath, exploring Manhattan on his own on the occasion of his eleventh birthday.
About the Author :
David Flusfeder is the author of seven novels and one work of narrative non-fiction. He has been a TV critic for The Times, and a poker columnist for The Sunday Telegraph. He has written for The Guardian, The Observer, New Statesman, The Mail on Sunday, Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung amongst others. His short stories have been published in anthologies and magazines, including Granta, Esquire, Arena, He Played for his Wife, The Seven Deadly Sins, New Writing 8, Fatherhood and The Jewish Quarterly. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Kent.
Review :
The Best New Fiction Set in the 1970s, this slender New York tale begins in the perspective of Emma, a writer trapped by her life as hostess wife to a philandering doctor, worryingly keen to put her on pills. Then we cut to her son, opening a letter from her on his 11th birthday, four years after her death. Flusfeder’s sinuous prose miraculously crams all the emotional drama of a multivolume family saga into just 80 pages.
This novel is divided into two halves. The first is an insightful study of the marriage of Emma Hoffman, a successful writer who “sees it all … ” and her Park Avenue doctor husband. It’s 1970 and on the surface they are a perfect, successful couple but all’s not well: “ … he pretends not to notice the glittery bright darkness that surrounds them.” It’s a morality tale in living a lie. The beginning employs an enjoyable, concise prose that condenses information. The second part follows their son as he wanders on his 11th birthday, grappling with the difficult relationship with his dad. Also … but let’s not spoil it. The second half perks up with the introduction of a homeless guy. This short book is sporadically moving and insightful.
The novella is set in two separate years, 1970 and 1974. In New York in 1970 … we meet Emma Hoffman, a discontented married writer who lives on the Upper West Side of the city, and has spent most of her marriage hosting upscale parties. Invitations to such parties are supposedly the social cachet of the in-crowd …
With a grace and sophistication that leaves one marvelling … In an even more subtle way, the book is a work of genius.
Something Might Fall is, by turns, profoundly dark and fearlessly beautiful.
