Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn: A Novel

by Alice Mattison

Overview

One quiet spring day in 1989, Constance Tepper arrives from Philadelphia to watch over her mother's Brooklyn apartment and her orange cat. Con's mother, Gert, has left town to visit her old friend Marlene Silverman in Rochester. Marlene has always seemed alluring and powerful to Con, and ever since Con was a little girl, the long-standing bond between Gert and Marlene has piqued her curiosity. Now she finds herself wondering again what keeps them together.

Con's week in Brooklyn will take a surprising turn when she wakes to find that someone has entered her mother's apartment and her own purse is missing. Stranded, with no money, she begins to phone family and friends. By the end of that week, she will experience a series of troubling discoveries about her marriage, her job, and her family's history, and much of her life will be changed forever.

In the fall of 2003, now living in Brooklyn and working as a lawyer, Con has almost forgotten that strange and shattering week. But a series of unsettling reminders and surprising discoveries—including traces of a lost elevated train line through Brooklyn—will lead to grief, love, and more questions. At last, a confrontation between Marlene and Con's daughter will unravel some of the mysteries of the past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061430558
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	09/16/2008
Series:	P.S. Series
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.72(d)

About the Author

Alice Mattison is the award-winning author of four story collections and five novels, including Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn. She teaches fiction in the graduate writing program at Bennington College in Vermont and lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Editorial Reviews

A delightfully suspenseful domestic drama. . . . Mattison’s novel summons the same exhilarating feeling as sitting on a stoop on a sultry New York City evening, enraptured by a neighbor’s gripping tale.

New York Post

Con doesn't try to find out what she needs to know—her daughter forces it on her. And this, finally, gets us to the heart of the story, to what makes it succeed: the poetry of Mattison's detailed evocation of love and affection, withdrawal and confusion, peace and forgiveness, being a mother and being a daughter.
—The New York Times

Dominique Browning

Mattison's latest combines a dark comedy of manners with even darker midlife family suspense. Constance "Con" Tepper plays the starring role in two long vignettes that take place 14 years apart. In the first vignette, Con is 45 and staying in her mother Gertrude's Brooklyn apartment to watch the cat. During this episode, "Gert" has a terrifying and paralyzing experience, the repercussions of which affect both her and others' lives in the intervening years and in the later vignette. Although there are almost too many threads to keep track of in Con's story, the one that is most important and most fully realized jumps back to an even earlier episode: a mid-century correspondence between Gert and her friend Marlene Silverman. This fascinating epistolary device acts as a tempting breadcrumb trail through the women's lives and leads to the wrenching denouement. Though not all the subplots work (a major one involving Con's biracial daughter, Joanna, is flat), the overarching examination of friends and family is captivating. (Sept.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

A woman confronts suspicious circumstances surrounding her mother's death 14 years earlier. Mattison, known for her unusual structures, has bifurcated her latest novel (The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman, 2004, etc.), which alternates between 1989 and 2003. In 1989, Con, 45, is babysitting her 70-something mother Gert's cat in Gert's Brooklyn apartment while Gert is visiting her friend Marlene. Marlene and Gert's friendship dates back to World War II, during which, as Con learns from perusing her mother's old correspondence, Marlene manipulated Gert into investing in a black-market racket run by Marlene's mobster boyfriend Lou. Con's husband Jerry, who travels solo to research historical arcana, is visiting Fort Ticonderoga, and Con is miffed that her teen daughter Joanna has accompanied Jerry, who's never asked Con along on one of his expeditions. The irascible, imperious Marlene calls repeatedly, urging Con to let her assume power of attorney for Gert, who, she claims, is losing her faculties. One night, Marlene informs Con that Gert died in her sleep. In shock, Con overlooks the smoking guns, including Marlene's failure to call 911, Marlene's insistence that Con hand over Gert's financial records, the fact that Marlene, a vet assistant, is handy with a euthanasia needle and especially the fact that Marlene had somehow been appointed Gert's executor in place of Gert's two daughters. By 2003, Con recalls these events-except for the profound dislocation wrought by her mother's death-only in blurred fragments. She's long divorced from Jerry, and feisty Joanna has won a fellowship to intern with a womanizing sculptor. Marlene, Con's friend Peggy, Joanna and Jerry (researching an abortiveBrooklyn train project) are all converging on her for the weekend. Although Con has forgotten her misgivings about Marlene, Joanna has not. Joanna suspects Marlene did more than merely siphon money from Gert, and she sets out to learn more. Reconstructing Marlene's malfeasance makes for a pleasant puzzle, but the real pleasure here is time spent with the less flamboyant characters as they cope with more mundane upsets.

Kirkus Reviews