In Case We're Separated - by Alice Mattison (Paperback)

About the Book

Book 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."

From the Back Cover

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."

Review Quotes

"Mattison's voice is like that of no one else writing today." - Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"You'll want to read it a second time." - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Alice Mattison's 'In Case We're Separated' is my idea of self-indulgent escape: fiction that provides the fascination of details and complexities of everyday lives, the excitement of seeing evanescent encounters held still in words, the musical beauty of the words themselves.... Before your very eyes unfold the sudden shifts in mood by which we negotiate relationships. [It's] fiction that makes a thrilling display of mundane experience." - Deborah Tannen, Washington Post

"Devastating. . . . Mattison's stories have an arresting focus and navigate the cliches of Jewish-American fiction firmly and knowingly." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"These beautifully crafted stories, told out of chronology and with a shifting focus from one family member to another, hold firmly together. They cohere in seen and unseen ways, suggesting that family makes its own poetry." - Boston Sunday Globe

"A jewel of a collection.... masterful.... You'll want to read the stories again to find the repeated objects, and to solidify the characters' relationships in your mind - and you'll find the stories are every bit as rich and satisfying the second time around." - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Alice Mattison writes well about secrets, the kind that are kept for generations despite dedicated, relentless prying by friends and family. As a young writer, she was the undisputed queen of wackiness, but with 'In Case We're Separated, ' Mattison has matured into the kind of writer that makes you laugh nervously." - Los Angeles Times

[In IN CASE WE'RE SEPARATED] Mattison deftly keeps the characters memorable individuals, each armed with a fierce intelligence, warmth and failings that make them more human - The Jerusalem Report

"Devastating... The title piece begins in 1954, when the divorced Bobbie Kaplowitz's Thursday-night-and-Saturday-morning boyfriend exchanges her electric mixer for another, and realizations ensue. "I Am Not Your Mother" swiftly and mercilessly tackles clannish pre-WWI immigrant experience, while "Boy in Winter," set in the present, constructs a brilliant minimystery, as gay urban studies writer Brad moves with partner Warren to Wanda, Wis., and then to Somerville, Mass. Noisier and brighter if not as broad in scope as Joan Silber's recent, also interlinked Ideas of Heaven, Mattison's stories have an arresting focus and navigate the clichs of Jewish-American fiction firmly and knowingly. As the images repeat and characters recur, the family's involuntary interconnectedness emerges starkly, even as the characters experience wildly differing epiphanies - and have varied, vivid reactions to them." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Radiant... [In Case We're Seperated] is a book filled with felicitous writing and ferocious insight." - New York Times Book Review

"When writers erect a visible scaffold around their work, they usually incorporate that architecture into the story. Think of 'The Periodic Table' [by] Primo Levi... or Vikram Seth's novel in verse, 'The Golden Gate....' What's different about Mattison's approach is that she has made the scaffolding invisible.... Radiant... [In Case We're Seperated] is a book filled with felicitous writing and ferocious insight." - Sue Halpern, New York Times Book Review

"Her new collection of stories follows the members of one family -- immigrants, sisters, cousins, lovers -- as the generations progress. An added treat for the reader is discovering her inclusion of certain objects that reappear in all 13 stories in different ways, just as certain words appear in the form of poetry known as a sestina. The stories are related, but each can stand on its own, and all are finely wrought." - Hartford Courant

"'In Case We're Separated' offers you the opportunity to discover a writer whose stories, while peopled by ordinary folks, are rich with extraordinary insight.... These 13 stories... mimic the form of poem called a double sestina... an interesting conceit, an unexpected gift for the reader. But even without those links, this novel-in-stories is captivating, the work of an author who makes magic from the mundane and whose voice grows more assured and authoritative with each new book." - Hartford Courant, also appeared in Newsday

"Radiant. . . . a book filled with felicitous writing and ferocious insight." - Sue Halpern, New York Times Book Review

"Devastating.... Mattison's stories have an arresting focus and navigate the cliches of Jewish-American fiction firmly and knowingly." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)