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Fiction

Two New Novels Expose the Fracturing of the American Nuclear Family, From Midcentury to Today

Credit...Sophia Foster-Dimino

THE FAMILY TABOR
By Cherise Wolas
381 pp. Flatiron Books. $27.99.

A LONG ISLAND STORY
By Rick Gekoski
311 pp. Canongate. $25.

Harry Tabor, the protagonist of Cherise Wolas’s new novel, “The Family Tabor,” has everything: At 70, he hits a mean tennis ball, sports an enviable tan and enjoys a vigorous sex life with Roma, his brilliant psychologist wife of 44 years. When Harry rises in the morning and his feet first touch the travertine marble floors, his eyes alight upon a meditation pool out back. His three children are thriving in their high-powered careers. And tonight, the city of Palm Springs, where he has lived for three decades, will celebrate his philanthropic work — using his vast fortune to resettle Jewish refugee families — by naming him Man of the Decade at a gala attended by 800 admirers.

Harry, in short, is good for the Jews. Or is he? Taking a break from tennis to hydrate in the 100-degree heat, he experiences a religious hallucination: Instead of a tennis court, he is in a shul, and a cantor in a white robe is singing the Kol Nidre, the prayer that initiates the holy Day of Atonement. (Then again, who wouldn’t hallucinate playing tennis in such high temperatures? At least the cantor is wearing tennis whites.) It turns out Harry has some major atoning to do: For 30 years, he has blocked from his memory the fact that he made his fortune on Wall Street by committing insider trading and fraud, and managed to send his friend, the innocent Max Stern, to prison in his stead. (Not only was Max innocent, he was also undergoing treatment for leukemia at the time. Shame on you, Harry Tabor! You are definitely not good for the Jews!)

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As the Tabor children arrive back home for the weekend, we learn that they’re less than perfect themselves. Camille, an anthropologist living in Seattle, has not told her family she is suffering from a depression so crippling she has quit academic life to work at a hospice. Phoebe, a lawyer in the Los Angeles art world, feels such pressure to marry she has made up a fake boyfriend, complete with a name and a job and a travel schedule to explain his absence from family events. Which sounds like the premise of a Sandra Bullock rom-com, except Phoebe is a peevish weirdo. Simon, also a Los Angeles lawyer, with a glamorous Spanish wife and two gorgeous children, hasn’t slept in a year. His struggle: Heretofore agnostic, Simon wants to get back to his Jewish roots and raise their girls as Jews, but Elena, his Catholic wife, refuses — and reveals she has been sneaking out to church without telling him. Wolas illuminates the rich, complex histories of the older Tabor generations, when they were Tabornikovs, and the sense of loyalty to one’s family history is so vivid in the novel it is practically its own character. Unfortunately, it also takes up a lot of space in an already long novel.

As the family arrives at the gala and begins to greet the guests, Harry disappears. He has boarded a plane for Israel, hoping to beg for Max’s forgiveness. Although the novel will never grant him absolution, the process of atonement does finally begin.

“The Family Tabor” suffers from one jarring flaw: Harry has forgotten for 30 years how he made his fortune. He confessed to his wife, who’s a shrink, at the time, and she made him promise to give the money back. How has the subject not come up since? (Also, they’ve been having fabulous sex for 44 years? I’d like a hallucinatory cantor to come into my life and tell me how that works.)

More intriguing is the back-and-forth Harry has with himself over the morality of what he has done. How to weigh his crimes (insider trading, betrayal) against his good deeds (resettling hundreds of refugee families who would have suffered and perhaps died in their own countries)? These are among the richest sections of the book, and there are not enough of them. Instead, we get too much about Phoebe and why she’s single.

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In Rick Gekoski’s “A Long Island Story,” we meet another Jewish family and another novel that treats its survival — and indeed the entire history of Judaism — as a precious tabernacle to be carried through the generations. It is 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower is president, and Ben and Addie Grossman and their two young children are fleeing Washington and its toxic McCarthy-era environment for what they hope will be a simpler life on Long Island. Ben, a lawyer for the Department of Justice, can no longer tolerate working for “a government that not merely tolerated the rise of fascism but supported it institutionally, in the House and Senate, that had a president so frightened to stand up for what was right that it had begun to appear — could this be possible? — that the Beast himself was slouching to the White House to be born.” The Beast, in this case, is Senator Joe McCarthy.

They move in with Addie’s parents in a bungalow in Huntington during a heat wave. The pediatrician chides Addie for taking her children to the beach to cool off because they’ll get polio. The kids have to transfer from their posh D.C. private school to a public school on Long Island. Addie hates her neighbor, who also happens to be her sister-in-law.

The novel, less a political story than one of a family unraveling, is loosely a roman à clef; Gekoski writes in the acknowledgments that his tale is inspired by the story of his own childhood, and that he tried and failed to write it as a memoir. Unfortunately, he has now chosen to tell it from the adults’ point of view, so we lose the richness and insight the young Gekoski must have experienced so intimately. I would have loved to read this book as a fictionalized memoir told from the boy’s perspective, like Darcy O’Brien’s “A Way of Life, Like Any Other” (a fantastic fictional autobiography of growing up as the child of Hollywood movie stars), Tobias Wolff’s “Old School” or J. M. Coetzee’s “Boyhood.” As it stands, the adults in the novel feel empty, distant, just gossiping shadows passing before the children’s eyes, talking about politics and divorce and affairs — and the heat, oh, the heat. As a result, the children, Gekoski’s richest opportunity for a true voice in this novel, are lost.

Alex Kuczynski is the author of “Beauty Junkies.”

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: It’s All Relative. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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