We Are Gathered

April 1, 2018
Monologues in the voices of six guests, plus the mother of the bride, at a wedding in Atlanta."There is no justice in this world, and you can start with the simple fact that some people look like Elizabeth Gottlieb," announces Carla Leftkowitz at the opening of the first story in Weisman's fiction debut, set at Elizabeth's wedding among the Jewish elite. The beauty of her lifelong friend, whom she now serves as bridesmaid, is particularly enervating because Carla has a port-wine birthmark covering half her left cheek. Author Weisman's background as a dermatologist adds texture to Carla's furious ruminations on physical beauty, as she passes her time imagining her 17 sister bridesmaids with "double chins, saggy breasts, twenty unlosable pounds around the middle, disappointment creased into their foreheads," yet she also dreams of a time "when we evolve to see the beauty in the stroked-out and the misshapen, the one-eyed and the cleft-lipped, the swollen and the stained." In the next story we hear from a character even more bitter than Carla: Elizabeth's grandfather Albert, a powerful, repellent man now mute and confined to a wheelchair after a stroke. Next up...a close family friend, who's attending with her nasty husband and also-wheelchair-bound son, the latter having been Elizabeth's charge when she worked as a teenager at a summer camp for the disabled. There are just a few tendrils of backstory to tie the characters together and virtually no plot development in the present tense of the wedding, so these long forays into the unhappy characters' inner lives have to hold the reader's attention on their own.Though the wild, wounded rant of the opening story seems promising, by the time we get to the mental patient and the Holocaust survivor who wander (separately) off into the woods, the reader, too, is ready to leave.

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May 1, 2018

Elizabeth Gottlieb is getting married; and although her bridegroom isn't Jewish, the family has invited 150 guests to the celebration. This debut novel by memoirist Weisman (As I Live and Breathe), however, is not about Elizabeth but about several of the guests at the wedding. Elizabeth's grandfather has suffered a stroke yet muses on his past successes as he's pushed around in a wheelchair. A college roommate of Elizabeth's father, now an artist, has an unrequited crush on Elizabeth's mother. There is Carla, a close childhood friend with a disfiguring port wine stain on half of her face, who may never find love; and a great aunt, who is a Holocaust survivor reliving her experiences and searching the woods near the wedding ceremony for her murdered sister and the sister's lover. VERDICT As the stories of the guests converge, readers are presented with the lives of both successful and unsuccessful but largely unhappy individuals. Weisman's ability to explore these troubled minds creates a multifaceted story of the difficulties people face.--Andrea Kempf, formerly with Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS

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