All This Could Be Yours

Fantastic novel about a dysfunctional family. The writing is so on point and the inner lives of these characters so well observed. This book has so much to say about the relationship between men and women.

Reminded me of the writings of Philip Roth.

I loved this novel of a dysfunctional American family - just my kind of read!

It's very character-driven and I always enjoy books where the minutiae of individual's lives are laid bare.

Many of the characters were not very likeable, but still you ended up rooting for them anyway.

Thanks to NetGalley and Serpent's Tail/Profile Books for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

An astonishing observation of the human condition "All This Could Be Yours" is a breathtaking example of literary artistry - I was blown away.

Dysfunctional families are Jami Attenberg's stock-in-trade, and nobody understands them better than her. In my albeit humble opinion, these microcosms of the human condition - vis-à-vis the family, are nothing short of literary artistry. "All This Could Be Yours" fulfilled my high expectations and more. Families are not the petri dishes of psychiatric study, with the mad, bad or plain evil, inevitably leaving victims in his wake, and it is no different with the Tuchman of this novel. The story focuses on the last days in the life of Victor Tuchman, patriarch and another 'path', this time psychopath of the Tuchman family. Make no mistake, I do not mean psychopath as in serial-killer stalking the streets to satisfy an unrestrainable blood lust archetype - no, I mean the type of psychopath that Jon Ronson spoke so vividly off in "The Psychopath Test". Victor is a bad man indeed, but made in the image of Bernie Madoff, rather Ted Bundy - a strutting peacock of a conman-come-financier who first appeared on Wall Street in the 1980s. Victor's crimes are of the domestic type in "All This Could Be Yours", with the focus on the family reunion around Victor's death-bed. We have Barbra, Victor's wife and their two children, Alex and Gary. Attenberg's sparkling narrative, with its perfect pacing and uncanny insight into what makes human 'tick' brings Victor's crimes to the fore with her perfectly calibrated prose. Like depth charges stalking a submarine across vast seas, there are explosions on every page, offering insights into this complex, and often ugly domestic drama at the heart of the Tuchman clan. You will be captivated, enthralled and experience an almost visceral response to the characters that leap off the page in Attenberg's masterpiece. I know I did. So, get reading - you won't be disappointed.

This book takes place over a day in New Orleans: in the morning an abusive patriarch Victor has a heart attack and by midnight he is dead. The story follows his family as they grapple with the legacy and trauma caused by this brutal and misogynistic man. His wife Barbra is an elegant, beautiful and empty woman cloaked in diamonds and a Fitbit which she obsessively watches as she paces around the hospital waiting for her husband to die. She has lived a life of compromise for comfort, dependence and love - in a heartbreaking scene at her daughter’s birth, she negotiates with her husband telling him that ‘If you ever even think of hurting her, just hurt me instead. But you leave her alone’ (he largely abides by this, except for the 5-6 times when he doesn’t and strikes his daughter nonetheless). The daughter Alex is a lawyer, pressing her mother for the truth on Victor and his criminality, as her mother in turns urges her to forgive her father. She herself is recently divorced from a charming, successful but philandering man, trying to be civil in the aftermath to build a warm, supportive parental network for her daughter. The son Gary is in Los Angeles and is reluctant to be at Victor’s side as he dies, his whole life an attempt to define himself despite the cruelty of his father - early in his relationship with his wife he says, ‘I am the way I am because he was the way he was’. This is a tender and empathetic novel about surviving familial trauma and the catharsis that death liberates the protagonists to pursue.