3/16/2024 0 Comments Merle ochrach steven schwartz![]() ![]() The gravity of events, the occasional big coincidence, and the ripping pace of the action could approach melodrama. As a writer, I found myself making notes in the margin, studying Schwartz’s deft and strategic technique. No spoilers, but it’s a different surprise than the one the reader anticipates, and soon followed by another twist. ![]() Tom,” Ardith’s tennis partner.ĭuring this raucous, wonderfully distracting scene, Schwartz subtly lays the fuse for the explosive event that occurs after the party, rocking the family’s personal world and reverberating with serious consequences throughout the community. Everyone they know or want to know is there, including the popular “Dr. The party includes competitive drinking and hot sauce shots. She’s furious the expensive outfit she’d intended to wear is in the town dump because Reuben thought the bag of dry-cleaning on the porch was trash. For example, the family attends a huge birthday celebration for a new friend. Well-chosen small transgressions signal bigger problems. Present action and crisis are interspersed with brief revelatory memories and back story. Later that night, Harry in his room, tooth tenuously in place, the parents argue, full of shame and blame about what they are doing to each other and their sons.įrom those first scenes, Schwartz ramps up the stakes and tension rapidly, using short chapters usually from the point of view of Reuben or Ardith. Ardith takes off with the boy for the dentist. Reuben presses his son to say who attacked him and why he was out of school. The chief of police, Reuben’s “erstwhile lunch companion” in this small town where everybody knows everybody, found Harry wandering the state road, face bloody, a tooth knocked out. The book opens at a moment of crisis, in the emergency room. As a writer, I was interested by the efficiency with which the author introduces their predicament and prepares the ground for what follows. The Rosenfelds’ troubles rapidly get worse. There’s an adage in fiction writing, “No trouble, no story.” Schwartz, author of two prior novels and four story collections, knows his way around stories, and families. Ardith and Reuben haven’t made love in months. Their Victorian house is a money pit, and so is the financially strapped local paper where Reuben is editor in chief. They moved from Chicago, “looking for a small-town cure and a fresh start” to Reuben’s professional struggles, Harry’s emotional and social problems, Jamie’s asthma, and increasing distance in the marriage.īut rather than providing a geographic cure, the move to this small town exacerbates the Rosenfelds’ problems. ![]() Reuben and Ardith Rosenfeld and sons Harry and Jamie are recent transplants to Welden, Colorado. Steven Schwartz’s new novel The Tenderest of Strings is the story of a marriage and a family in trouble, an exploration of how family ties constrain and sustain, stretch and snap. ![]()
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