Flusfeder, David - Something Might Fall

Funny, audacious, heartbreaking, one of those rare books that has the quality of lived experience. Emma Hoffman and her son Nicky will live on in readers’ memories and imaginations. An utterly convincing portrait of marriage and family life and of a child survivor in 1970s New York. Beautifully written and unforgettable. A truly emotional read that will stay with the reader forever. A beautifully written and utterly convincing evocation of 1970s New York. New York City 1970: Emma Hoffman is the great party-giver of the Upper West Side. She’s a writer, wife, mother, hostess, guest, trying to excel and trying to find a way through the agonies and complacencies of it all – because at any moment something might fall, perhaps herself. 4 years later, her son is going out alone into the streets of Manhattan on his eleventh birthday, to make himself new, and prove to be worthy of the birthday letters he continues to receive from his lost, soaring mother. Something Might Fall is set in a moment when women’s literary voices were being heard, but the conditions of those writers’ relationships and their domestic obligations were not so different from those of their mothers. The first part, which swoops and stutters between Emma Hoffman and her husband, is about a woman at the edge of herself and is also an account of a marriage, embodying two consciousnesses in a mutual misunderstanding and disappointment and hope and sometimes magic. The second part is limited to just one point of view, of their son Nicky, the living in aftermath, exploring Manhattan on his own on the occasion of his eleventh birthday.