2020 was my year for reading Maggie O’Farrell; 2021 is becoming my year for reading Sarah Moss. After being impressed with her Ghost Wall and Summerwater, I thought I’d read one of her earlier novels.

The novel’s narrator is Adam Goldschmidt, an underemployed academic and stay-at-home dad. His wife Emma is a chronically stressed, overworked, and exhausted doctor so Adam is the primary caregiver to 15-year-old Miriam and 8-year-old Rose. When not taking care of the household (shopping, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry) and the girls’ activities, he is writing a guidebook on the post-war reconstruction of Coventry cathedral.

One day Miriam collapses at school. She is revived and hospitalized for a time to determine why a healthy teenager would suffer cardiac arrest. Since the cause cannot be determined, the family has to adapt to living with the possibility that Miriam might again stop breathing at any time. The book focuses on life’s impermanence and learning to live with that uncertainty: “how can we live once we have understood that any or all of us may be killed while tying our shoes or going up the stairs? While reading a novel, or writing one?”

Miriam must face the possibility of death but the novel focuses more on Adam’s reaction to “the new reality in which death stood in the corner of every room and came to breathe over my shoulder whenever I took my eye off him.” As expected, he worries and struggles not to be overprotective but to give Miriam “her own tidal zone.” Like the parents of a newborn, he regularly checks that his daughters are breathing. Miriam has had a brush with death and their safe world has been shattered, but a parent’s daily responsibilities continue: “Everything is paused, except that Rose still needs to go to school and to eat her meals, and the laundry must still be done and the bathroom cleaned.”

Adam finds some comfort in being part of a global web of suffering parents: “It is normal for children to die. Look at Syria, at Palestine, at Eritrea and Somalia. Look at the tidelines of beaches in Italy and Greece. Look, while we’re on the subject, at certain parts of Chicago and Los Angeles.” He tells Emma that “’the way things are for us now is the normal one, globally and historically. It’s everyone else who’s anomalous. Everyone who doesn’t think it could happen to them. . . . It comforts me to think that most parents in most of time and most of the world have lived with this fear as a matter of course.’”

The message is that we are all fragile and though we should acknowledge the possibility of sudden death, we should not let it dominate our lives: “there is death and suffering and evil” but “there is beauty” too. Though we should appreciate life and health and life’s ordinary extraordinariness, “May we forget. It is a pity that the things we learn in crisis are all to be found on fridge magnets and greeting cards: seize the day, savour the moment, tell your love – May we live long enough to despise the clichés again, may we heal enough to take for granted sky and water and light, because the state of blind gratitude for breath and blood is not a position of intelligence.” We must continue living because “’You can’t go round not loving things because they’ll die.’”

Interspersed with the family narrative are two other stories of rebuilding and moving forward after a catastrophe: we learn how Coventry cathedral was designed and reconstructed after being bombed during World War II and about Adam’s father’s life in the U.S. after his Jewish parents “crossed the seas to escape bad times.”

Readers in England will undoubtedly note the many criticisms of the National Health Service, the publicly funded healthcare system. Emma comments that the NHs is so stretched that “’the only people who get treatment are the ones who aren’t safe’” and “’the whole system is now running on the last dregs of the goodwill of burnt-out doctors.’” Adam notes the injustice “that we are all in a country that pays young women more to impersonate elves in a shop than to give expert care to critically ill children.”

The book shows role-reversal parenting. It is the woman who is the workaholic who is usually home late and even when home is working. Adam is usually the only father dropping off and picking up a child at school, and faces challenges because of his gender. For example, he takes Rose to a swimming pool for a birthday party and has to rely on the help of another woman: “the father of daughters too young to be sent alone into the women’s changing room . . . must take them with him into the men’s room. Even stay-at-home dads who know how to use the delicates cycle on the washing machine and clean a toilet before it needs doing can’t go into the women’s changing room. The power dynamic between small girls and a room full of naked men is not . . . the obvious way round.” When he waits in the lobby and watches the pool to make certain Rose has come through the changing room to the pool, he is told, “’Some of the mums don’t think it’s right, a man standing there watching the kiddies like that.’”

Like the other Sarah Moss novels, this one is thought-provoking. Though it touches on serious topics, there is humour. And it is so beautifully written and breathtakingly realistic!

Note: Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski). ( )

A hard novel to read for any parent, this nightmare scenario of a daughter who collapsed and stopped breathing for no reason. A multitude of tests mean that much of the novel is spent in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a hospital, a parent sleeping by the bedside of Miriam, the 15-year old daughter. Sarah Moss writes brilliantly and openly about how the parents and sibling cope with this family emergency. Alongside this is the story of granddad and his journey across America, from commune to commune. Adam, the father, is also researching and writing about the building of Coventry Cathedral and the creation and building of this magnificent cathedral pops up during the novel. Sarah Moss writes at the end of this novel, 'Stories have endings; that's why we tell them, for reassurance that there is meaning in our lives.' But she adds, 'Stories are not the truth ... We are not all, not only, the characters written by our ancestors. I have told my stories now, and we are still here ...' A moving and passionate read that felt full of love and interest. ( )

Didn't expect to enjoy this as much as I did, extremely readable (or listenable, as I went with the brilliantly acted Audiobook) and Adam, the books narrator, is perfectly realised. ( )

"It is not all right, but there is beauty. We have ways of saying that it is not all right, that there is death and suffering and evil, and they are the same ways we have had for hundreds of years. Buildings. Glass. Weaving.

Words."

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I loved this novel. Adam and Emma and their two daughters, Miriam and Rose, are characters I will cherish for a while. In this story, 15-year-old Miriam experiences an episode of anaphylaxis and stops breathing. She is resuscitated and she survives, and this novel explores the dynamics of the family in the weeks and months following this terrible confrontation with mortality, especially the mortality of the young.

Sarah Moss, who is becoming one of my favorite authors, writes exquisitely, whether she is describing the bickering of the two girls, or the history of the design and construction of the Coventry Cathedral which is the subject of Adam's academic research. The gender roles are secondary here; Adam is narrating the story and marital tension, including that created by nontraditional arrangements regarding income and household duties, is certainly one theme. But Moss is less concerned with how we navigate marital strife than with how we navigate love and loss and the terror of our mortality. As Emma says, "you can't go round not loving things because they'll die," but how on Earth do we tolerate the risk? ( )

Emma and Adam have been married for a number of years and have two daughters. Emma is a GP, and Adam has chosen to stay at home be the house husband. He has a little work at the university and is currently working on a history of the bombed-out Coventry Cathedral. Though Emma is suffering with the stresses of the modern NHS, it is a happy family life. Then one day Adam receives a call from the school. Miriam has collapsed and stopped breathing. He rushes to the school, arriving shortly after the paramedics, and heads into the hospital with her.

As they come to terms with a daughter who has a serious illness, their whole family life is turned upside down. After a barrage of tests, the doctors are not completely sure what is up, so she is allowed home. As they come to terms with the changes they start to fret over the smallest things, worry over their other daughter and question things that happen to Adam’s mother that was never explained.

It is a sharp look at modern life, the way that we interact with each other. Moss has managed to write about the pressures that we place on ourselves, as well as those exerted by society with startling accuracy. It is a celebration of the mundane as well as those moments that draw a family together. However, it is a warning of how thin we stretch ourselves whilst failing to keep the work home life balance and a warning of how transient life can be. ( )