Some characters are just too good to let go after a single book: Olive Kitteridge, Hercule Poirot, Tom Sawyer. And now, in Wreck, Catherine Newman has given Rocky, the sharp-witted, neurotically doting mother who narrates her delicious 2024 novel, Sandwich, a repeat engagement.
When we first met her in Sandwich, Rocky was thrilled to have her husband, grown children, and aging parents all together under one roof during the family's annual vacation on Cape Cod. But squeezed between generations and moodily menopausal, she was feeling the weight of both past secrets and future change.
Wreck is even funnier, yet also more earnest in its explorations of life's fundamental impermanence. It picks up the story of Rocky and her brood two years later, back home in western Massachusetts. Wreck can stand on its own, but chances are, you'll want to read both books.
Wreck's cover, like Sandwich's, features a soft-focus photograph of an alluring porch-fronted all-American house that telegraphs that this novel is not about a real estate teardown. In fact, the title refers to Rocky's state after being knocked off-kilter by a serious health scare and a local train crash that hits too close to home.
Newman's novel is animated more by wit, warmth, and worry than by plot. Its plot, such as it is, is set in motion when insomniacal Rocky, awake in the wee hours, googles the insidious rash that is spreading over her body. That's mistake number one. Mistake number two is reading a local news report about a high school classmate of her son's, who has been killed in a collision with an oncoming train at a railroad crossing.
The rash leads to an increasingly alarming medical odyssey, while the train crash leads to disturbing theories about how this might have happened. One plausible explanation involves a consulting firm that advised the railroad to save money on maintenance. (It's more complicated than that, but I'll leave readers to untangle the situation.)
This isn't the first time Newman has made light of dire diseases: We All Want Impossible Things, her moving and improbably funny first novel about the death of a dear friend, was so convincing I thought it was a memoir.
At her best, Newman evokes Nora Ephron. Rocky works from home writing what she's well aware are silly Home-ec type articles for various publications. She's a font of hilarious riffs about the absurdity of life — the ridiculous complexity of juice bar menus and the frustrations of modern medicine. She complains to her family about being fired from her own "etiquette column," but happily, we get to read her over-the-top angry email drafts to her editors before she wisely deletes them.
Sometimes, Rocky's life feels like an updated version of cozy mid-century sitcoms about idealized American families. She's still the one cooking dinner every night and making coffee every morning for her unerringly supportive husband Nick, a physical therapist, her grieving 92-year-old father, who moved into their home temporarily a year ago after his wife's death, and her anxious, queer, migraine-afflicted daughter, Willa, who is back home from college, working in a local university lab while applying to Ph.D. programs in neuroscience. But unlike those sitcom moms, Rocky is a regular customer at her favorite marijuana dispensary. (A camping trip where she and her best friend get stoned and laugh uncontrollably falls flat.)
One of Newman's strengths as a writer is her ability to evoke widely shared predicaments with fresh images. When Rocky's father can't recall an old friend's name, she writes, "I know this exact feeling. I can be on my mental hands and knees, flailing around under the couch of my mind with a hockey stick, trying to sweep out a name I can't remember — and all I'll dredge up is a Ping-Pong ball, a catnip mouse, and a spool of thread. If I look away, though, sometimes it might creep out on its own little feet."
Newman can veer sentimental, but she mostly pulls off another mix of irreverent quips and heartfelt reverence in Wreck. At one point, frequently flippant Rocky describes herself as almost pathologically empathic," an undammable river of mother love."
During soothing woodland walks with her family and consoling cuddles with her daughter and cats, that river pretty much overflows its banks. Rocky gushes, "this moment, here, with my beautiful daughter in the beautiful world." Smitten parents will relate.
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