Being Esther

February 25, 2013
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.

January 1, 2013
Over the course of her last days, widowed Esther Lustig, 85 years old and determined to avoid being placed in Cedar Shores (aka Bingoville), reflects upon her life. A photograph from the past sparks this tale. Snapped in 1944, two weeks before Esther's date died in the war, the picture shows Esther with her best friends, who had spontaneously jumped on stage, mugging for the camera as an imaginative girl band, the Starrlites. Now Esther wants to find her friend Sonia. As Esther's narrative toggles back and forth between her past and her present, she worries whether she has made any lasting impression upon the world. Born to parents raised in a Polish shtetl, Esther learned modesty and frugality, neither of which appealed to her haughty mother-in-law, Toots Lustig, who chided her rustic cooking skills. Her husband, Marty, ate like a horse but strayed from his marital vows. Esther recalls her attraction to Marty but also her frustration with his domineering manner. Orbiting around Esther are her family, particularly Ceely, who is mysteriously angry with Esther and eager to shuffle her into a nursing home; her friends, several of whom have died or sunk into dementia; and the outside world, filled with rude and well-meaning people, all of whom treat Esther as an insignificant old woman. An awkward phone call to Sonia's husband, a showdown with a rude customer at the market, a barely expressed quarrel with Ceely--these scenes, like a collection of photographs, accrue and build toward Esther's acceptance of her past, which leaves her ready to slip into the next world. Karmel's debut novel is a quiet contemplation of a woman's final days.

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April 1, 2013
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)