FICTION
“Days of Awe: A Novel”
by Lauren Fox
Knopf, 272 pages, $24.95
Like that lethal dude Liam Neeson plays in the movies, novelist Lauren Fox (“Still Life With Husband,” “Friends Like Us”) has honed a very particular set of skills.
She takes women who are falling apart and pulls wit, snark, pith, and occasional insight out of them. No contemporary novelist makes me stop as often to mark or admire one of her sentences. Plenty of people can write limpid or fancy prose, but Fox ladles out one flavorful reduction of human angst and misery after another.
“Days of Awe” draws its title from the period of the solemn introspection urged upon Jews between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, though Fox’s narrator, Isabel Applebaum Moore, also experiences gentler moments of wonder and appreciation.
The novel opens at the funeral of Josie, Isabel’s fellow middle-school teacher, who died in a late-night car crash. “She would always be my wild, grieving, huge-hearted, selfish, confident, insecure, extravagant best friend,” Isabel tells us.
Moving backward and forward, Isabel recounts the history of their friendship while unraveling the skein of events and decisions that led to her death. Josie had been married to Mark, Isabel’s childhood buddy and Hebrew school classmate; Izzy and her husband, the gentle gentile Chris, often hung out with them. The more outgoing Josie seizes Isabel as a BFF on the day they meet, bonding over inanities at a faculty meeting; readers will detect, almost immediately, edgy and manic notes in her behavior.
Intersecting the horizontal axis of the couples, Fox gives us the vertical of Izzy with her mother Helene and her daughter Hannah, 11 at the outset. Were “Days of Awe” the pilot script for a TV series, actresses would throw elbows to audition for Helene, who escaped the Holocaust as a little girl, unlike her relatives, and lets no one forget that. Eyeballing a contender for Izzy’s affection, Helene whispers to her, “Is he the kind of person who would hide us in an attic?”
But Helene, in the aftermath of a stroke, faces her own diminishment gloomily, unnerving Izzy, the 43-year-old daughter who still depends on her emotionally.
Fox sets her novel in a recognizable Milwaukee. But in one poignant flashback, Izzy, Chris and 4-year-old Hannah wander around the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center until they reach the observation tower.
Not every one climbs it, but each one sees something wonderful.
