Check out Celeste Ng’s interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books with Diamond Head author Cecily Wong. An interesting conversation between two lauded writers, it was all the more special for me thanks to Cecily’s generous words about A Reunion of Ghosts, which she names as a book she’s recently read and loved, saying it’s “one of the most darkly hilarious novels I’ve ever read and just whip-smart.”
Thanks so much, Cecily. I’m blushing as red as the ribbon on your book jacket.
Recently my friend, the poet Lauren Russell, asked me to suggest an A Reunion of Ghosts-themed menu for her mother’s 39-year-old book club.
I put on my thinking toque, trying to come up with book-related food. At first I was stymied. For the most part the narrators in Reunion, three baby boomer sisters who are unhappy to the point of planning to commit suicide, pay little attention to their nutritional well-being. Gourmets they’re not. Their idea of a great home-cooked meal is spaghetti doused with Kraft’s blue cheese dressing. Barely functioning alcoholics, they have been known to glug vodka straight from the bottle.
Finally I came up with a menu that includes puns (the Alter sisters’ favorite form of humor) and jokes as well as a fancy version of that spaghetti dish. The recipes below will serve 6. Adjust accordingly. And if anyone out there can come up with additions or substitutions, please let me know via the comments.
Cocktail: Vodka Tonics, Alter Style (recipe provides 2 cocktails per guest):
1. Purchase 12 mini-bottles of vodka
2. Pour contents of mini-bottles into a pitcher
3. Add to pitcher 1 3/4 quarts tonic water and juice of one lime. Stir. Refrigerate.
4. When ready to serve, pour contents of pitcher into the individual mini-bottles, screw tops back on, and serve. Reserve remaining vodka tonics for later.
5. To be faithful to the book, guests may wish to consume their cocktails while sitting on a bathroom floor.
Hors d’oeuvres:
German pretzels with mustard dipping sauces.
(In Reunion, the family’s patriarch, Lenz Alter, synthesizes the first poison gas used in warfare. Lenz, who is based on the chemist Fritz Haber, actually synthesizes chlorine gas, but mustard gas was just around the corner…and serving chlorine dipping sauce would be too mordant even for me.)
Bite size squares of date nut bread iced with cream cheese
(To avoid spoilers, I’ll just explain this choice by saying that a certain character in the book is fond of the date nut bread and cream cheese sandwiches that used to be served at the now-defunct Chock full o’ Nuts restaurant chain.)
Main course: Pasta with Blue Cheese Sauce (from www.food.com):
Ingredients:
2 cups half & half
4 T butter
1 head garlic, chopped
1 small onion, chopped
1/3 – 1/2 C crumbled bleu cheese
1/3 – 1/2 C parmesan cheese
salt and pepper
1 lb. pasta (the Alter sisters would use spaghetti, but penne may be more elegant)
Prepare the pasta. While it’s boiling, melt butter in sauce pan over med-low. Add onion and garlic and saute about 5 minutes. Pour in half & half, let heat through. Whisk in blue and parmesan cheeses. Add salt and pepper to taste. Sauce will thicken a bit upon standing. Toss with cooked pasta and serve.
Dessert: Suicide by Chocolate Cake (from www.cooks.com):
1 chocolate cake mix
1 sm. box instant chocolate pudding
1 (12 oz.) pkg. chocolate chips
2 eggs
1 1/2 C milk
1/2 C chopped pecans
vanilla ice cream
This article in New Zealand’s Sunday Star Times sort of sneaks in a little review of Reunion. After listing her 10 favorite things about winter, ending with her favorite merino trench coat, author Linda Hallinan realizes the coat reminds her of something the Alter sisters said. She writes:
“Isn’t that what fashion is? A nonverbal means of lying about the sad, naked truth?” quips one of the trio of single, suicidal sisters in Judith Claire Mitchell’s new novel, A Reunion of Ghosts. (A dark comedy, I was hooked by page four when it was revealed that the sisters – Lily, Veronica and Delph – were all named for flowers, although “Delph is short for Delphine, which our mother thought was the name of the vivid blue perennial, but actually means ‘like a dolphin’.”)
Ms. Hallinan then decides to augment her list of favorite winter things:
“Make that 11 things I love about winter: devouring novels in one go without feeling the least bit guilty about sitting on my chuff, comfortably indoors, while my garden, stripped starkers, shivers out in the cold alone, looking decidedly worse for wear.”
I have to admit, as a person who doesn’t mind a little chuff-sitting myself, I can’t help but applaud this addition. As summer approaches in this hemisphere, here’s to cozy winters and novels.
Thanks to Books-a-Million for featuring Reunion in their “Hand-Picked By Our Book Experts” section. You can click on the title below to order from BAM. As the Alter sisters would no doubt say, “Wham, Ma’am thanks you, BAM.”
No, that title isn’t a typo. It just reflects the fact that this lit lover can’t help but love Lit Lover, the book review site for book clubs trying to find just the right read. After all, how can an author resist a book site that not only names her novel a “new book to watch” along with books by Kate Atkinson, TC Boyle, and Alice Hoffman, but places it in their “wonderfully written” category? In fact, how can an author resist a site that actually has a “wonderfully written” category? I love critics and readers who want more than mere plot, who also want and notice and celebrate good writing.
The entire review is here, but here’s the takeaway:
Funny though it is—and it is often very funny—Mitchell tackles serious cosmic issues, ranging from the meaning or meaninglessness of life, acausal time (all events are random), coincidence vs. synchronicity, and the burden of history—how ghosts from the past continue to haunt the living….
This is a brilliant, tender book about tragedy that can erupt not only on a world scale but in everyday life. Yet the story is also about the consolations of deeply felt love. The Alter sisters are enchanting, and so is Mitchell’s wonderful novel.
I’ve loved how kind the WSJ has been to me and to A Reunion of Ghosts–and by WSJ, I mean the Wisconsin State Journal, of course–but today the other WSJ–The Wall Street Journal–also sent Reunion some love, when poet, biographer (most recently of Stalin’s Daughter), and essayist Rosemary Sullivan included Reunion in this week’s Best Five books feature. Because the article is behind a pay wall, I’ll paste the part about Reunion here.
The novel begins with the quote, “The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the 3rd & 4th generations” and offers a portrait of four generations of the Alter family from the mid-19th century to the late 20th. The Jewish German great-grandfather invented a process that served both as a fertilizer to maximize world food production and as mustard gas in World War I. In one scene, Alter, testing his experiment, watches as enemy soldiers die in agony. “Death is death,” he rationalizes. (Alter is based on the real inventor of chemical warfare, Fritz Haber.) Alter’s invention becomes the gas used in the Nazi extermination camps. The novel focuses on three daughters of the fourth generation. It is they who carry the guilt of their great-grandfather’s invention. They are witty, almost unrelievedly funny, unforgettable and terribly damaged. “DNA as a trail of bread crumbs,” the narrator, Delph, muses. The girls see suicide as salvation: “We talk about the horizontal light . . . that sometimes replaces sunlight. . . . [It] is . . . like an opalescent blanket inviting us to slide beneath it.” The writing is macabre, deliciously brilliant and hilarious, but you have to have a mordant sense of humor to love this book.
I’m heading to New York City and environs tomorrow. I’ll be doing three events, of which two–the Barnard panel and the BookCourt reading–are open to the public. Here’s the whole schedule:
1) Thursday, May 28: Jewish Book Council Conference 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm I’ll be participating in the JBC’s famous (infamous?) author pitch sessions, described by the New York Times as a combination of The Gong Show and speed dating. Basically, authors get to talk about their books to reps from book clubs across the country for a whopping 2 minutes (and yes, they time you to the second and boot you off stage after 120 of those seconds elapse, even if you’re in the middle of revealing the secret to world peace). It sounds like harrowing fun.
2) Friday, May 29: Barnard Author’s Panel 8:30 am – 10 am. At this breakfast panel convened for Barnard’s Class of 1975’s 40th Reunion, classmates Sonia Taitz, Cathleen Schine, and I will talk about our paths to becoming novelists. Helayne Angelus, another classmate, will moderate. Cost: $10. Location: Barnard Campus, Altschul Atrium (ground floor of Altschul Hall), 3009 Broadway, NY, NY. Specific room TBA.
3) Friday, May 29: BookCourt Bookstore 7:00 pm. Reading and Q&A with Judith Claire Mitchell and Charles Dubow. Charles and I will be reading from our latest novels, chatting with each other and the audience, and signing books. Join us!
Sam Hankin, proprietor of Wellington Square Books and Cafe and Emporium outside of Philly and host of The Avid Reader podcasts, gabs with me for almost an hour about Jewish mothers, Carl Jung, gin martinis, judging books by their covers, Anthony Doerr, creative criticism, and every now and then, when we remember why we’re talking to each other in the first place, A Reunion of Ghosts.
Click below if you have an hour you need to fill listening to Sam and me having a grand old time.
Thank you to Good Housekeeping over in the UK for naming A Reunion of Ghosts one of their must-reads for May. Say the good people of Good Housekeeping:
Anyone with sisters will relate to A Reunion Of Ghosts, a pitch-black comedy starring three eccentric middle-aged siblings who believe their family is cursed. The sharp humour is tempered by the loveable characters created by Judith Claire Mitchell.
I was happy to be asked to contribute an article to “10 of the Best,” the long-running literary series in The Guardian. My contribution is the “Top Ten (Unconventional) Ghosts in Literature.”
