Review: Nissen's 'Good People' is not-bad book

"The Good People of New York"
By Thisbe Nissen
Knopf
Fiction
290 pages

By Adam Dunn
Special to CNN

(CNN) -- In "The Good People of New York," her meticulously written first novel, short fiction writer Thisbe Nissen has apparently tried to illustrate the dynamic which both binds mother and daughter together and drives them apart. It's a relationship all too often dismissed as "love-hate,"ignoring the subtle nuances which keep this tendency alive between generations.

The writing about the mother-daughter dynamic is where "The Good People of New York" best succeeds. But other aspects of the book, most notably Nissen's heavy-handed metaphors, don't quite come together.

The mother in the book is a first-generation Jewish New Yorker named Roz Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig is working as a legal secretary in Manhattan in 1970 when she meets and falls for a young, non-Jewish (Nebraskan!) attorney named Edwin Anderson. Their meeting leads, in short order, to their marriage and the birth of their daughter, Miranda.

Miranda's birth firmly and forever aligns Roz on an insular course wherein she and her daughter are as a single ship, and all others are but ships which pass in the night -- a metaphor Nissen returns to again and again.

Hidden emotions

By staying too close to her daughter, Roz ends up driving others away. She becomes distant from her husband, whose midlife crisis starts to undermine their marriage. Over and over, Roz's central focus on Miranda is reiterated, to the extent that she herself becomes unsettled by it. She wonders if she is repeating the same stifling motherhood tactics her own mother, the strong-willed Adele, used on her.

Which, of course, she is.

Thisbe Nissen

As Roz realizes she's becoming her own mother, Adele drops a bomb of her own: She has cancer. The way Nissen reveals this says much about Adele and the woman her daughter is becoming: "Adele Rosenzweig told no one, not even her daughters, about the cancer until it was too late for anything to be done."

Eventually, Roz and Edwin divorce, and Roz and Miranda take center stage. Miranda progresses through childhood as a latchkey kid and begins to feel the first pangs of prepubescent uncertainty right around the time her mother starts dating again. Evincing an early interest in drama, Miranda is shaken through her first crush on an upperclassman in a drama club. (The author's affinity for "The Tempest" is hinted at throughout the book, from the epigram to Miranda's namesake, as well as the ship metaphor, which becomes denser as Roz tries her luck with her daughter's orthodontist in a chapter titled, "The S.S. Steven Stone.")

Vexing bonds

The pair's life is filled with strangers and friends entering their New York home, characters who help give the book its title. But Nissen focuses, almost claustrophobically at times, on Roz and Miranda and their life crises: Miranda's unfulfilled crush and her longing for older men, which she promptly fulfills with her new stepbrother; Roz's releationship with Stone; Miranda's high school days.

The joke is that Roz and Miranda, despite their closeness, reveal less to each other than the book's other characters.

Eventually, the novel eventually halts sometime around the present, with Miranda back from her first term in college. She's now savvy and self-confident enough to have already slept with one teacher, started shaking her head at her mother's ever-meandering neuroses, and only vaguely aware that she is showing signs of them herself. What began as a typical New York love story ends in a sort of grudging acceptance of the enduring and vexing bonds between mothers and daughters.

The book fades out with Miranda mulling over "All that is not perfect and never will be, but is all right ... because they're still there, still there with each other." This is both the strength of the book's realism -- that the banalities of untroubled existence are preferable to the unpredictable storms which threaten to eclipse it -- and the weakness of its thematic resolution. One wishes that these unremarkable women would achieve something more remarkable than just making it through together after so much.

"The Good People of New York" is well-written and well-constructed, and a decent debut from the 20-something Nissen. But like a drifting boat, it could use a little more direction and a firmer hand on the rudder.