When I hear the term family saga, I think of a fat, detailed tome tracing multiple descendants over multiple decades. Although Jami Attenberg’s eighth novel, A REASON TO SEE YOU AGAIN, does qualify in the sense that it follows three generations of the Cohen family, from 1971 to 2007, it is quite a short book, wonderfully specific when it needs to be, but free of unnecessary “period” detail or background.

In the very first scene, you are thrust into the competitive drama of a Saturday night Scrabble game and what it reveals about each of the family members: the detached father, Rudy, a frail and, as it turns out, bisexual Holocaust survivor; wife and mother Frieda, clever, frustrated and furious; Nancy, a socially adept teenager; and 12-year-old math genius Shelly, the most strategic of them all.

We will follow these four, plus a granddaughter, for more than 30 years, encountering alternate points of view, shifting locales and a few riveting people in supporting roles: Nancy’s husband, Robby, a successful businessman and committed bigamist; Margaret, Shelly’s coworker at her high-tech job (and perhaps not-quite-platonic friend); and Frieda’s ambitious pal from her work as a nursing-home aide, Carolina, who convinces her to move to Florida.

"There is a cinematic quality to A REASON TO SEE YOU AGAIN... The writing is splendid: fresh, disciplined, with a wry matter-of-factness that avoids sentimentality.... It’s the characters who drive the book..."

Attenberg handles it all like a master, which is no surprise, as family has often been the subject of her fiction. THE MIDDLESTEINS (2012) was the blackly comic tale of an obese woman and her relatives, and ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS (which I reviewed for Bookreporter.com in 2019) was about the death of an unloved and unlovable patriarch. And despite her satirizing of the cheesy self-help gospel preached by one of the characters in A REASON TO SEE YOU AGAIN, Attenberg herself has dipped into mass education and inspiration with 1000 WORDS, a craft handbook based on an online writing community she started in 2018 (I’ve used it; it’s candid and practical and really, really good).

There is a cinematic quality to A REASON TO SEE YOU AGAIN, each chapter featuring intense scenes that sum up the family members’ status at that point, but which skip over the intervening years --- a technique Attenberg uses to make the book compellingly suspenseful, kind of like giving us the puzzle pieces without the complete picture on the box. Big events --- such as Rudy’s death, or the birth of Nancy’s daughter, Jessica, or Shelly’s abandoning grad school to work in the brave new world (in 1981) of mobile phones --- take place off-screen, as it were, or are referred to casually, almost as an afterthought.

And instead of flashbacks, in this book there are foreshadowings: projections into the future lives of the characters. You would think this would sabotage any hope of narrative tension, but it doesn’t work that way. Instead, it adds to the sense that this is a book about families stretched and remote, if not precisely estranged, over time and space. What we’re reading are only episodes from an entire life.

The writing is splendid: fresh, disciplined, with a wry matter-of-factness that avoids sentimentality. There is the horror show that is Christmas when Shelly visits Nancy, Robby and Jessica at a house in the Arizona desert (“Just some Jewish girls eating ham beneath a Christmas tree….”). There are family secrets (the discovery of Rudy’s clandestine stash of silk robes --- and his hidden sexual identity) and secret families (Jess turns out to have four half-sisters, thanks to Robby’s triple life). There is Frieda and her partner, Ray, “alive and dead at the same time,” lost in an alcohol-soaked existence in Florida, and Shelly being ambushed by a proto-#MeToo scandal involving her boss and his female employees. But the plot, while lively, is secondary. It’s the characters who drive the book, even Rudy, who dies early on but haunts the women in his family like a tragic-yet-romantic ghost.

That’s why the title and the cover illustration --- a photograph of a rose-pink vintage Princess phone off the hook --- are so perfect. The whole book is a study in the ambiguity of family relations (“You know who the real terrorists are?” Shelly thinks in 1981, upon seeing photos of Muammar Gaddafi on magazine covers. “Your family”), and the way cash is used as a substitute for emotional connection by Robby and Shelly (“The constant exchange of money had numbed them both,” muses Jess, the recipient of her aunt’s handouts).

But there is also a great deal about the intimacy that persists among blood relatives. Nancy and Shelly always tell one another the truth: “Even as they challenged each other, moved in and out of each other’s lives over the years, disappearing entirely at times, it was a thing they thought they could count on when they needed it.” One thing they share is being abused by Frieda after Rudy’s death. She didn’t hit them, but “she smacked them around with her words.” Yet toward the end of her life, she apologizes: “I’m sorry I wasn’t as tender to you as I should have been then, and that in fact I was cruel, but I did not have it in me to be kind.” In the final section of the book, when Frieda is old and ill, Jess bonds with her grandmother, while Nancy remains largely aloof. Frieda and Shelly, though, play a daily game of Scrabble, bringing the book full circle. “…Shelly took it easy on her mother, let her win a few times. They were softer to each other now, at last.”

This is not to say that A REASON TO SEE YOU AGAIN ends in permanent reconciliation and infinite bliss. The Cohens have always been poster children for neurotic behavior and bad choices, and they will be again. Yet you become awfully fond of all five; you want them to do better, be happier, come through. Ultimately the book holds out hope that even the most alienated families are still bound by a thread of love.