“What happened is people were hurting. What happened is people were afraid. What happened is that anger is stronger than fear, and so, for that matter, is hate. But it is easier to know what you want to burn down than it is to imagine what you might grow in its place.”

Taking place in the week of Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate hearing, the main character, Ethan, has become starkly aware of how he and his social justice warrior wife, Zo, are growing apart in their small-town life. She’s so focused on activism and establishing equity in America that he is no longer a priority for her, and it seems like their daughter is less and less so as well as he takes over most parenting duties and she shirks her work and is rarely home unless she’s invited over the local resistance group of women, All Them Witches. The result is an introspective journey volleying back and forth from Ethan’s early career in NYC to their shared present in the Berkshires, investigating all that comes with living in present-day America.

“All of these moments, all of the others, the one he remembers, the ones he doesn’t, their whole messy, complicated everything, has been distilled into a singularity that pops like a soap bubble and vanishes forever. That’s all over and it’s never coming back.”

For fans of Separation Anxiety and Fates and Furies, this is another a book of our time that presents multiple dialogues on how messy America has become and how all types— the young and the middle aged, the wealthy and those just getting by, the single people and the long-time married, the urbanites and suburban families— are managing, or not, to get through it all. It’s a delightfully deep dive into parenthood and materialism and imposter syndrome and righteousness and nihilism and lust and aging and being alive. I’d happily have stayed alongside Ethan for longer as I so enjoyed his awkward niceties and his daughter’s brilliant charm as well as Zo’s, and the witches’, burning rage.

“The weeping woman isn’t so sure she believes in humanity, not right now. But still. She pulls the car over. And that is the answer to the question Ethan used to ask me: what, exactly, is the point of a tiny protest, in the middle of nowhere, seen by almost no one? The point is that the person who does see might need exactly this, exactly now. The point is, her individual grief can become part of a collective one. The point is, this may or may not change the world, but it will almost certainly change her.”