Being Esther
A Novel
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Eightysomething Esther Lustig tells the story of her life in a witty, touching novel that “will linger long in readers’ minds and hearts” (Pioneer Press).
“Widowed and in her mid-eighties, Esther checks in with her friend Lottie each morning to confirm that each has made it through the night. But there is no way that she’s going to surrender to her bossy daughter, Ceely, and move into an assisted living facility, which she disdainfully calls Bingoville. In her first novel, Karmel takes an understated and disarming approach to the closing years in the life of a seemingly ordinary woman, imbuing Esther with a subtle but zingy wit and underappreciated intelligence. Esther reflects on her mother’s frostiness and her mother-in-law’s ‘acid tongue,’ her own passion for books, the grinding disappointments and late-blooming joys of her marriage, and Ceely’s harrowing incommunicado years. Brimming with keen observations yet slow to articulate them due to her body’s strange new hesitations, Esther is appalled by how strangers treat her as an ‘object of concerned looks and condescension.’ Karmel’s novel of womanhood, the love and strife between mothers and daughters, marital dead zones, and the baffling metamorphosis of age is covertly complex, quietly incisive, and stunning in its emotional richness.” —Booklist
“Being Esther is impossible to put down . . . a wonderful debut.” —Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The heroine of Karmel's meandering debut novel is Esther Lustig, an 85-year-old widow who has led a quiet, middle-class Jewish life in the Chicago suburbs. Confronting the inevitability of death and the gradual diminishment of her faculties, Esther rummages through the past from her marriage to an overbearing man, to her difficult relationship with her daughter, to thoughts (and even, a little more than thoughts) of romance with other men. Increasingly alone as her friends die or fade away, Esther regrets a life led without risk, and struggles to stay independent when her children try to put her in a home. The narrative progresses through loosely tied vignettes of the past and present, which dwell on the muted struggles and triumphs confronting an elderly woman whose life is defined by her ordinariness and quiet dignity. With its too-easy melancholy, the unremarkable plot is unfortunately matched by flavorless prose, and in the end, little insight is gained into Esther. The novel has graceful moments that aspire to the heights of Grace Paley or Alice Munro, but the overall effect is forgettable.
