New Judy Blume novel is an 'Event'
Judy Blume was in the eighth grade when, over the span of only a few months, three commercial flights crashed in and around her hometown of Elizabeth, N.J. One of the airliners went down just two blocks away from her junior high school.
Blume's new novel for adults, In the Unlikely Event (*** out of four), fictionalizes the accident-struck town of Elizabeth she knew in the 1950s, tracing the lives of its residents as the town is rocked by tragedy after tragedy.
Blume's novels have sold more than 85 million copies, and most of those are accounted by her plainspoken and frank classics for adolescents, including Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. Those readers won't be disappointed here. But at the same time, In the Unlikely Event has a much larger canvas to play on than do Blume's novels for younger readers; by spanning generations, her book allows for a deeper examination on what it means to seek individuality within the constraints of family and culture.
Though the viewpoints in the novel rotate among the cast, we return most often to 15-year-old Miri Ammerman. Even as she copes with the local crashes, she has to figure out her young adulthood, navigating her relationships with her beautiful single mother, her wise grandmother and her uncle — and the new acquaintance of Mason, a handsome orphan.
When Mason heroically rescues survivors from the wreckage of one of the planes, it only heightens his attractiveness to Miri. While calamity brings out the best in Mason, it does the opposite to Miri's best friend Natalie, who begins to hear in her head the voice of a glamorous young dancer who died in the first crash. Natalie's eventual hospitalization for mental illness is a reminder that not everyone can recover from witnessing something like a plane exploding in her backyard.
Few events are more sensational than a plane crash, and Blume seems slyly aware of this fact — though she'll follow doomed characters onto the flight and get them seated, the book tastefully turns away before recounting the crash itself. The narrative switches to newspaper snippets and play-script dialogue during its most heated moments, preventing it from careening into melodrama.
In fact, Blume's modest writing style is perfectly suited to such a dramatic topic. Her prose is plain, never preening over its own turns of phrase. It's as if Blume doesn't want us to lose sight of what's important — the simple reality of what her characters are going through. For what the novel lacks in surface beauty, it gains in an accumulating sense of homespun honesty.
Despite the hook of its premise, most of In the Unlikely Event isn't crashes and drama; for the long narrative spells between plane crashes, the novel is much more interested in the dynamics of being a person in the ordinary world. The narrative is so deliberate and quiet during those spells that it risks becoming boring — but then, of course, a plane will go down and the novel's pace jolts to life.
Blume's novels for adolescents are so popular — and so frequently banned — because they delve into sensitive topics like menstruation and masturbation with directness and candor. Adult readers of In the Unlikely Event will encounter that same forthrightness now, but with their additional life experience they might find the book's honesty less transfixing than in the Blume books they read as teenagers.
Then again, when we read about a 50-year-old character confessing that sex with her husband is difficult because "she's not sure she can get there — something new, something perimenopausal," we realize that the same Judy Blume is still here, opening our eyes to the daily astonishments of life all these years later.
Eliot Schrefer is the author of the young-adult novels Endangered and Threatened.
In the Unlikely Event
By Judy Blume
Knopf, 397 pp.
3 stars out of four