Books in Review
Brian Morton’s ‘Breakable You’: A cynical yet tender novel
By Beth Kissileff Perlman

SPRINGFIELD - In his last novel, “A Window across the River,” a couple faced with an unplanned pregnancy choose to abort the child, and consequently break up. 
In his newest book, “Breakable You,” a couple faced with the same circumstance bring the life into the world. Though one might be tempted to think this would produce a saccharine, optimistic novel, one would not have read Brian Morton. This is a very New York novel - cynical, yet tender, sophisticated yet likeable.
“Breakable You” begins with the meeting of a divorced couple -- as the ex-wife attempts to lob a half grapefruit at her former spouse n and ends with a tableau in a cemetery. This image, which includes a baby, enacts the actions of the mythological Sisyphus, eternally rolling a stone up a hill. This mixture of realism - there are an awful lot of cemeteries out there filled with those who have suffered unnecessarily - and tempered optimism - is what makes Morton such a wonderful writer. 
Morton has, in three previous novels, including the Koret Jewish Book Award-winning “Starting out in the Evening,” staked out the territory of literary Upper West Side New York Jewish intellectuals grappling with their life choices. Yet, Morton’s characters in his newest book are not the dull navel gazers one might expect from this simplified description. 

‘Flaws and strengths’

When “Breakable You” opens, Adam Weller has left his wife Eleanor two years previously after strings of flimsy affairs over the years, and he is relieved to be rid of her. Weller is a novelist who, in the estimation of a Rutgers professor charged with giving over a large amount of money for a foundation trying to call attention to Jewish writers and visual artists, “hasn’t done much lately.” 
Eleanor is a therapist for whom “listening was her art,” and who gave up her own aspirations as a writer when she first married Adam. They have two grown sons who live outside New York and a daughter, Maud, a graduate student in philosophy who is the moral center of the novel. Maud must learn to balance the flaws and strengths of her parents; in Morton’s words, “If each of her parents had been a little bit more like the other, then each of them might have become a complete human being. Her father would have had some feeling for other people, and her mother would have had some drive.”
Maud is working on a philosophy of how to treat others, and the reader gets snippets of American philosopher Richard Rorty, Albert Camus’ aforementioned “Myth of Sisyphus,” and German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. She finally reaches a moment of truth after reading “Contemporary Arabic Poetry” in a public library in Sparta, N.J. While I don’t want to diminish the pleasure of Morton’s plot twists, I will say that Maud is Jewish, and she is reading these poems in an attempt to learn what it means to have compassion for one’s enemies. One of Maud’s philosophical subjects of study is Rorty, who writes that, “we naturally feel sympathy for people we know, people in our own tribe, before we feel it for ‘the other,’ and that a humanitarianism that tries to deny this will inevitably be delusional.” However, the possibility of gradually enlarging who may be in this category exists. 
His description of his fictional writer and the need for knowledge of “how to cut,” can be applied to Brian Morton as well. In the slices he carves of the lives of his characters, their flaws and attempts to be whole, he does achieve a wholeness without the “peace of a happy ending.” 
“Breakable You” ends with the word “family.” In Morton’s previous novel, the characters end up alone, while here despite the obstacles and suffering, they attempt to knit themselves into the flawed structure that is the human family. The reader has a remarkable opportunity to watch Morton create this fractured structure in “Breakable You.”

If you go…
What: 2006 Jewish Book Fair presents Brian Morton, author of “Breakable You.”
When: Tuesday, Nov. 7, at 7:30 p.m.
Where: Springfield Jewish Community Center, 1160 Dickinson St., Springfield.
For more info: Call (413) 739-4715 or visit the Web site at www.springfieldjcc.org.

Beth Kissileff Perlman is chair of 2006 Jewish Book Fair at the Springfield Jewish Community Center.