Review: Rosalind: A Family Romance: A Novel

Rosalind: A Family Romance: A Novel by Myra Goldberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have to confess I can’t be unbiased as I review this. I don’t know Goldberg, but my son has registered to take a fiction writing class with her, so I feel as if I’m two degrees of separation from her.

That said, this is an ambitious book. At a technical level, this aspires to something Joycean. It’s a series of intertwined stream-of-consciousness narratives that cumulatively tell the story of a family shaken by their wife-and-mother’s major open-heart surgery. Rosalind is young, but substantially overweight, and she needs the surgery to survive. It provokes her husband Henry into a state of uncertainty, her daughter Nana into a rebelliousness that consists of stealing her clothes and selling them to fund her track career, her brother Lev into accepting a lucrative job and coming cross-country with his family to be with her, and assorted others to re-examine their lives as part of a larger family.

As if all that weren’t enough, this is further Joyce-like in the way it maps its contemporary story onto a classic one. In place of The Odyssey, though, we get As You Like It. Just as that heroine, Rosalind, escapes a difficult situation by fleeing to the forest of Arden, so does our Rosalind. She eventually leaves her husband – she’s “banished” goes the description – to spend time with her mother in the small town of Arden. And then, as in the play, everyone joins her there. In that pastoral setting, the tribulations of their separate modern lives start to fade away, and they are able to be restored as a family and a loving couple.

Needless to say, I’m impressed. It isn’t easy to attempt such ambition, and it’s all the more difficult to make the characters compelling. In the best of this, I am moved by the different experiences, each intense and personal. It probably says more about me than about Goldberg, but I found the scenes from Henry’s perspective the most compelling. One sentence that particularly moved me (at the start of chapter 13) was “For in youth he’d chosen this Rosalind to be his joy, his other soul, his alternate body. Now death had shown up on their doorstep and Rosalind had taken him, adulterous, for her lover.” I think that’s a gorgeous encapsulation of his feelings as she, recovering from her heart condition but unwilling to give up cigarettes and other unhealthy habits, measures how she can love him as her new self.

In a similar fashion, Goldberg sums up the nature of Rosalind’s father from the perspective of her more aggressive mother. “It was Sidney’s bargain with life she couldn’t stand, not Sidney. For his good nature had been bought, she felt, by ignoring real dangers to his loved ones, had been paid for through passivity and at action’s expense.” That may not be universal, but it sure seems to define one way of critiquing some of the Jewish men I have known and whom Goldberg considers in this novel.

All of that said, there is a sense that some of this is dated. Impressive as the conception and prose is, the novel seems tied to its historical moment. (It’s written in the Reagan years, published in the Clinton.) There’s a sense that it explores a world before cell phones but after the ubiquity of long distance. It’s set at what might seem – in these Trump years – the dawn of a culture of narcissism, a cultural moment when people were just finding how much gravity their own personalities could have.

It’s hard to be much more specific than that, but a corollary is that this assumes a familiarity with Shakespeare that simply isn’t as widespread as it was. Without a sense of the connotations of “Rosalind,” it’s hard to appreciate this fully.

As a bottom line, then, I admire it but don’t know how widely I can recommend it. If you give yourself over to it – if you re-read As You Like It and then take this slowly, perhaps reading it twice – I think it’s likely to be powerful and maybe even formative. If you try to breeze through it, though (and I did move quickly through parts of it) you’re more likely to see it as a remarkable achievement that calls for slower attention to get the most out of it.


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