user: News article: Review: In ‘Among the Ten Thousand Things,’ Julia Pierpont’s First Novel, a Family Struggles

Reading “Among the Ten Thousand Things,” Julia Pierpont’s sharp, knowing dissection of an unraveling marriage, I kept thinking of Tolstoy’s overused remark that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Along with “There are no second acts in American life,” it has got to be one of the least-true famous literary observations out there.

Who’s to say what constitutes happiness, and whether one person’s idea of it is the same as anyone else’s? Families are complicated. Like most, the one in Ms. Pierpont’s book — Jack and Deb Shanley and their children, 11-year-old Kay and 15-year-old Simon — drifts along both happily and not happily, kept afloat by some complicated proprietary formula whose proportions are mysterious even to its members. They live in a nice apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Jack is a successful artist who makes large, provocative sculptures and installations that speak to post-Sept. 11 alienation; Deb, a former dancer, now works as a dance teacher and has default responsibility for the kids. Their marriage is hardly perfect (Jack cheats; Deb resents), but it has its own peculiar scaffolding and uneasy equilibrium.

The book begins at the moment when everything collapses. A box of incriminating correspondence — a deceptively mild-looking thing — arrives at the Shanleys’ home, poised to spray shrapnel everywhere. Sent by Jack’s most recent ex-mistress, it contains dozens of printed pages of filthy emails delineating exactly what the couple wanted to do to each other and how. (Adultery Rule No. 1: Do not use email! What do you think Snapchat is for?) Unfortunately, when it arrives, Kay is the only one home. She opens it, thinking it might be an early birthday present.

This is the first novel by Ms. Pierpont, a graduate of New York University’s creative writing program, and it shows a remarkably mature understanding of the delicate emotional balances in families — how feelings can flow back and forth like electricity in some kind of zero-sum game — and the subtle, irrational vicissitudes of people’s psyches. We follow first one character and then another as each tries to manage what has happened. It is an old story, a crumbling marriage, but Ms. Pierpont gives it fresh insights, making the particular unhappiness (and occasional happiness) of the Shanleys by turns poignant, funny and very sad.

The characters command your attention to different degrees. Ms. Pierpont does well with Jack and better with Deb, but the book really comes alive when she gets inside the children’s heads and follows them around. Like the best fictional alienated-children-of-New York — Holden Caulfield; the Brooklyn kids in Noah Baumbach’s film “The Squid and the Whale”; more recently, the teenager at the heart of Peter Cameron’s novel “Someday This Pain Will be Useful to You” — Kay and Simon exude an irresistible blend of worldliness and vulnerability, knowingness and cluelessness.

They think they understand a great deal more than they do. It felt very familiar. “You may know how to get a taxi in New York City,” my eighth-grade Latin teacher told the class in my own Manhattan school, responding to our latest bit of faux-sophisticated flippancy, “but you know nothing about the world.”

Simon and Kay really don’t. Simon’s biggest issue is that, as a teenager, he’s much more interested in himself than in what may or may not be going on with his parents. “It’s okay if you guys want to get a divorce,” he says, opening the refrigerator. “Can I have a water?” In one of the funnier scenes in a book full of them, he smokes weed for the first time, with some older kids, and is suffused with the classic paranoia of the neophyte drug-taker. “Was he high? Was this high?” Ms. Pierpont writes, as Simon quietly freaks out. “He felt like a science experiment gone wrong, and what if he just cried in front of them.”

The not-yet-adolescent Kay, meanwhile, hovers awkwardly on the fringes of a group of mean girls who destabilize her by “negotiating behind long strings of blonde.” She has become obsessed with, of all things, “Seinfeld” fan fiction, and in an episode that can only make you glad it did not happen to you, incorporates some of her father’s smutty email into a fan-fiction scene she writes (Jerry and Elaine are married, and Elaine overlooks Jerry’s affair). Disastrously, two of the mean girls, twins, get hold of it and tell their mother, and their mother tells Deb. She’d been willing to ride out the crisis until now, but no longer.

The book then shifts to Rhode Island, where Deb takes the children, and to Arizona, where Jack — who has had a possibly career-ruining experience at the opening of his latest installation — goes on a desultory work trip. How the family members fare while apart, what they do when they come together, whether they can work it out, how one little seemingly random event, a split second of a poorly-thought-out decision, can affect everything forever — that’s what the rest of the novel focuses on.

Having gotten to know these people and watched their undoing as if it were a slow-motion car accident, we long for a happy ending. There can be second acts in seemingly broken marriages. (Read Jenny Offill’s “Dept. of Speculation” for a recent literary example.) But in a daring interim chapter called “That Year and Those That Followed,” Ms. Pierpont widens her lens, temporarily abandoning her pointillistic moment-by-moment descriptions for a panoramic shot that sweeps years into paragraphs, projecting far out into the Shanleys’ future. It has the leaden sting of inevitability and cannot help dampening what is still to come. The die is cast, she seems to be saying. There is no going back.

AMONG THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS

322 pages. Random House. $26.

A version of this review appears in print on July 23, 2015, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: What’s in the Box? An Ex’s Revenge. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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assistant: Ms. Pierpont’s book, her first, breathes new life into the old story of a marriage falling apart.