Fathers and sons

In this well-wrought house of mirrors, a self-righteous, overprotective doctor splinters family and friends

November 22, 2009|David Thoreen, Globe Correspondent

In both the conception and execution of her stunning new novel, “A Friend of the Family,’’ Lauren Grodstein has channeled Edgar Allan Poe and his glowing review of Hawthorne’s “Twice-Told Tales.’’

Here is Poe, theorizing: “A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out he then . . . combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step.’’ Grodstein has made sharp practice of Poe’s theory, and she has done so not merely with a tale but a novel, which begins, “These days, when people ask how I’m doing - some of them still ask, you’d be surprised - I shrug and say, as manfully as I can, ‘Much better than you’d think.’ ’’

So we are introduced to Pete Dizinoff, Grodstein’s first-person narrator and protagonist. This first step - and each step that follows - is an unqualified success. Grodstein’s sentences are finely made and precisely fitted to one another and her story, but she is not the sort of writer who sends sentences up like fireworks, showering us with polysyllabic sparks. No, the real pyrotechnics here are structural; nothing is extraneous or coincidental. Poe’s own “William Wilson’’ comes to mind, for layered beneath the plot is a series of doubled images and actions, subtle enough that some readers will finish the novel without realizing they’ve just navigated a hall of mirrors. But trust me, all that glass is dangerous.

Grodstein is the author of two previous books, a collection of stories, “The Best of Animals’’ (2004), and a short novel, “Reproduction is the Flaw of Love’’ (2005) - she’s earned her craft, in other words, and if there’s any justice in the world, “A Friend of the Family’’ will be her breakout book.

Now in his 50s, Dizinoff has until recently practiced internal medicine in a New Jersey suburb called Round Hill. By all appearances an eminently safe man, Pete wants us to know he’s not without ambition. “[W]hat I longed for,’’ he tells us early on, “were the specialty cases, the sleuthy diagnoses nobody else had been able to figure. I’d caught the Sherlock Holmes bug during a medical school rotation.’’ We’ve been warned - “internist’’ describes Pete’s practice as a narrator, too.