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What teenager has never wished to be born into a different family? To experience a different set of parents, siblings if born an only child (or the opposite if brothers and sisters swarm), or to live in a different kind of family home?
Frederica Hatch, the precocious albeit naïve teenage narrator of Elinor Lipman's new novel, MY LATEST GRIEVANCE, is no exception. The only child of David and Aviva Hatch --- college professors-cum-dorm-parents at a second-rate all-girl's school in Massachusetts --- is turning 16 and chafing under the bonds of family love. Raised in an unconditional home even by 1970s standards, Frederica's parents are psychology/sociology professors and union agitators who pride themselves on their modern childrearing methods, including anatomically correcting her dolls and raising their only daughter as an equal. Her childhood is spent living in a dorm on campus, and Frederica grows up eating family meals communally in dining halls and sharing both her parents with every troubled student who knocks on the dorm-room door at Dewing College.
While Frederica loves her parents and enjoys her "college mascot" status at Dewing, she longs for a traditional family home with a car and parents who have normal jobs and aren't always attending Union meetings. So when she uncovers a surprising fact about her father --- that he was married previously, to a distant cousin no less named Laura Lee French --- she becomes exceedingly curious and strikes up a correspondence with Laura Lee, in spite of her parents' nervous protests.
And then the glamorous, devil-may-care Laura Lee gets a job at Dewing College, as a new dorm mother, and suddenly nothing in Frederica's life is remotely the same.
As in her previous novels, THEN SHE FOUND ME and ISABEL'S BED, Elinor Lipman strikes gold with her patented concoction of sensible-narrator-meets-eccentric-soul. The formula works, however, because each of her characters has such surprising depth that it's easy to connect with them. In MY LATEST GRIEVANCE, Frederica is a teen you can't help but love --- she's sarcastic and very articulate, but Lipman strikes a perfect note with her and you can see the child not far beneath the surface. Laura Lee is practically certifiable, but you can see glimpses of a warm heart that's had a tough time. Even Frederica's parents, David and Aviva, are not mere caricatures --- you can see real parental love and concern beneath the Julius-and-Ethel-Rosenberg exteriors. And the supporting cast is equally well-drawn, including the two-timing College President trying to worm his way out of a tough situation, and Frederica's grandmother-in-denial trying to hold together a rapidly disintegrating family Christmas.
As with most of her novels, Lipman doesn't shy away from a few thorny topics --- anti-Semitism, a common theme in some of her books, is touched on here as well. But as always, she addresses them with a light touch, firmly in keeping with the novel's light tone, and while she gets her point across, it's never heavy-handed. MY LATEST GRIEVANCE is a thoroughly enjoyable read in classic Lipman style, and fans of her earlier work will not be disappointed.
--- Reviewed by Lourdes Orive
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