I’ve been a fan of Catherine Newman since the days of her original blog, Ben and Birdy, which chronicled her life as a mother of young kids. I fondly remember her lentil recipes and her board game reviews and her humorous takes on the messiness of daily life. She’s kind of a modern-day Nora Ephron, with a talent for making the mundane entertaining.
Her novel Sandwich was published last summer and became a word-of-mouth breakout hit — a manifesto for the menopausal that explored the blessings and curses of caring for aging parents while simultaneously raising young-adult children. This fall, Newman returns with Wreck, which is set two years after the events of Sandwich. It finds main-character Rocky back home in western Massachusetts and once again surrounded by family — her husband, Nick, daughter Willa, and her widowed father, Mort, who has moved into a studio apartment behind their house. Her son, Jaime, is living in New York and working as a consultant.
Newman opens this novel with a quote from Nora Ephron: “Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know — it’s everywhere. You could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again, you could be.”
Wreck goes on to explore and embrace that attitude of sinking dread with an atmosphere of anxiety bordering on neurosis. When a local young man dies in a train-car collision, Rocky learns the victim was a classmate of her son’s and becomes engrossed by the case. Meanwhile, she’s dealing with her own medical mystery — a weird rash that starts spreading and defies explanation by her dermatologist and other clinicians. So Rocky googles her symptoms and the nearly indecipherable phrases on her patient portal, and she becomes convinced she’s not long for this world.
Wreck is everything we’ve come to love about and from Newman — a blend of pathos and humor that gets us thinking about your own life and the people you share it with. Every experience carries with it the possibility of comedy or heartbreak.
As Rocky scours the internet for information about her newest collection of symptoms, the episode serves to define her and her husband’s vastly different approaches to life: “His personality is very cross that bridge when you come to it,” she says. “Mine is very apply to engineering school in case there’s a bridge that might need crossing but it hasn’t been designed yet.”
Newman’s stellar dialogue and keen insights offer several laugh-out-loud moments, including her visit to a dispensary for “the THC equivalent of one-and-a-half beers,” which ends up being a chalky, low-dose lemon-lime candy her kids call “granny vitamins.” And there’s her father’s first trip to a juice bar, during which he marvels at the options and ponders the purpose of macha, collagen, spirulina and ashwagandha.
And remember carob? “The thing that was like chocolate, but dusty,” Mort recalls. “Dessert but not really. … You don’t hear so much about carob anymore.” This is true, Rocky nods. It’s all cacao now.
Fans of Sandwich will appreciate revisiting Rocky and her evolving family, but Wreck would easily work as a stand-alone novel, too. And where Sandwich took us to the family’s annual summer vacation in Cape Cod, Wreck has an autumnal vibe that leads up to Thanksgiving and the annual reminder to be grateful for our flawed and beautiful lives.
