Synopsis
Spanning the length and breadth of the twentieth century, Alice Mattison's masterful In Case We're Separated looks at a family of Jewish immigrants in the 1920s and 1930s and follows the urban, emotionally turbulent lives of their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren against a backdrop of political assassination, the Vietnam War, and the AIDS epidemic. Beginning with the title story, which introduces Bobbie Kaplowitz—a single mother in 1954 Brooklyn whose lover is married and whose understanding of life is changed by a broken kitchen appliance—Mattison displays her unparalleled gift for storytelling and for creating rich, multidimensional characters, a gift that has led the Los Angeles Times to praise her as "a writer's writer."
The New York Times - Sue Halpern
What's different about Mattison's approach is that she has made the scaffolding invisible. Were it not for her author's note, the fact that items are deliberately shared across the stories - or that the number of stories is itself meaningful - would probably be lost on the reader. That the poetic contrivance needs to be pointed out makes it feel like an incantatory device, akin to the "prompts" writing instructors use to jump-start their students' imaginations. In this case, it's a prompt that Mattison (the author of seven previous works of fiction and one book of poetry, and an instructor at the Bennington Writing Seminars) has given herself. The result is a book filled with felicitous writing and ferocious insight.