When is a joke not really a joke? Polly Goodman’s book group gives her an ancestry test kit as a gag, and she dutifully swabs and mails the samples.

At 42, Polly is going on year four of trying everything to have a baby with her stellar second husband, Mark, while coping with demanding parents and entitled teenage girls at the swanky New York City private high school where she teaches English. On top of all that, her beloved father is now in a memory care facility, and her mother… well, here is how she puts it to her sister-in-law, Emily: “I wouldn’t want to be a mother the way she was. It always felt like she had other priorities. Law school, then practicing, then judgeship. It always felt like we weren’t enough.”

"...[a] nuanced, multilayered novel... MORE THAN ENOUGH explores and ultimately resolves Polly’s predicament. Her existential questions keep us reading until the satisfying conclusion."

So when Polly receives a letter from Roots and Branches saying that she has a close genetic match who would like to meet her, she’s intrigued but reluctant. Her only sibling is her gay brother, who swears he’s never even had sex with a woman, much less impregnated her. And as kids they discovered birth photos of themselves under their parents’ bed, so they know they’re not adopted. Maybe the test is inaccurate. Still, Polly decides to follow through, and what she eventually learns leads her to reevaluate her most important relationships.

There’s a lot going on in this nuanced, multilayered novel. Polly narrates her own story with all the self-knowledge that a student of literature brings to the table. The themes are serious, but in Anna Quindlen’s skillful hands, they’re not boring or heavy. Emily tells Polly, “I spent the best years of my young life with a guy that I thought was the sun and the moon. Until he wasn’t. He was more like Pluto. Isn’t Pluto the one that was a planet, and then they downgraded it?”

The three other women in Polly’s book club --- Helen, Jamie and Sarah --- run through the narrative like a colorful thread: “Sarah took bad things to heart, except her own, which she took to heart but refused to wear or even air much.” Sarah was the catalyst for Polly meeting Mark, a veterinarian at the Central Park Zoo. It’s Sarah who Polly confides in the most, and vice versa. But self-knowledge and literary acumen only go so far. We all have our blind spots, and in the course of this novel --- largely through solving the mystery of her close DNA relation --- Polly becomes conversant with hers.

What is enough? With her diminishing chances of getting pregnant, Polly walks the razor’s edge of this question. She has her students, some of whom she cherishes, and her husband, who she certainly recognizes is a keeper. She has good friends, along with her witty and handsome brother. So why does she crave more? How can any of us answer, except that it is human nature to want?

MORE THAN ENOUGH explores and ultimately resolves Polly’s predicament. Her existential questions keep us reading until the satisfying conclusion.