Jude Cook
Game, Set & Love Match
When the Essingers, a middle-class family from Texas with four very different grown-up children, converge on New York for a long weekend, family tensions inevitably resurface. This is the basic plot of Ben Markovits’s sophisticated and engrossing eighth novel, yet there is so much more going on too.
On one level, the Essingers’ story is one of successful American immigration and integration. Patriarch Bill’s Jewish parents came to the USA to ‘sell groceries’, but they take against him for marrying out. They even consult a rabbi, hoping he will ask their son how he can marry ‘a woman who is not only Christian but German? As if these things don’t matter, history doesn’t matter, religion doesn’t matter.’ But Bill builds a family in which these things end up mattering less than love, happy children and the self-confidence that comes from successful careers.
While the two eldest Essinger offspring, Nathan and Susie, struggle with parenting and recalcitrant partners, younger brother Paul, a professional tennis player in his early thirties, announces he intends to give up the game on the eve of the US Open. Initially, it seems Paul’s struggles will be
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'It’s long been known that there is an optimum reproductive window and that women enjoy a considerably shorter one than men. For both sexes this window is opening and closing earlier than it used to.' (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-end-of-babies
Sixty years ago today, the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to enter outer space. @Andrew_Crumey looks at his role in the space race.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/one-giant-leap-for-mankind
On the night of 5th July 1809, a group of soldiers kidnapped Pope Pius VII on the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte. Munro Price looks at what happened next.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/bonaparte-meets-his-match