Wreck
by Catherine Newman
Harper
In literary novels, you tend to confront a lot more dysfunctional families than happy ones.
The primary reason for this is simple: The engine of story is conflict. If familial relationships are healthy, and characters are largely content, then what’s to keep us turning the pages?
Catherine Newman’s newest novel, “Wreck,” implicitly makes a strong case for this answer: a smart, witty authorial voice, paired with personal conundrums related to both morality and mortality.
Fans of Newman’s previous novel “Sandwich” – a critical darling included in many “best of the year” lists in 2024 – will rejoice in knowing that loving, sassy matriarch Rocky (along with her equally funny husband Nick and grown daughter Willa) is back in “Wreck,” this time contending with an ever-worsening skin rash that doctors can’t explain, and obsessing about a tragic accident that took a local young man’s life.
Though not someone close to the family, the crash victim, Miles, had been a classmate of Rocky’s oldest child, Jamie (now married and working as an efficiency consultant in New York City). News of the crash, along with menopause-fueled insomnia, leads to Rocky doomscrolling her local (West Massachusetts) Buy Nothing group’s listings in the middle of the night: “a Starbucks card that may or may not have any money left on it, two broken television sets, a dot-matrix printer, a cardboard box full of ‘pretty nice gravel,’ a plastic tortoiseshell eyeglasses chain along with a pair of sporks (‘Please take all’), a collection of barely expired Portuguese spices, a brand new name brand twin mattress, and a working air purifier shown with a banana for scale. Also someone is gifting five slices of turkey bacon. … I love that people are living outside of the grinding engine of consumerism and exploitation, but used bacon feels like a sad form of resistance.”
This passage demonstrates one of the reasons I loved “Wreck”: though it grapples with some serious issues in a sensitive, emotionally brave way, it also made me laugh. Quite often. (And I’m what my own family calls a “tough audience.”)
The book’s humor, when applied to our health system’s labyrinth-like bureaucracy, will inevitably make readers feel all-too-seen. Rocky explains how, in one day, she’s supposed to get blood work done, check the portal for results, call the doctor (if all looks OK) to ask for a particular prescription, request that they call it in, and then pick up and take the medicine. “This is what happens. I get to the lab and there are no blood-work orders. Or they run the wrong series of tests. Or nobody checks to see either the results or my message that the results are in. Or the pharmacy hasn’t gotten approval from my insurance company for the new prescription. Or the prescription is for the wrong dose. Or the pharmacy is out of the medication altogether. … It’s like a game of Whac-a-Mole, only there aren’t any moles, so you might as well use the mallet to bludgeon yourself to death.”
Moments like this are funny on their face. They also emphasize that the novel’s stakes, though often explored with a light gallows humor, are high. Rocky wouldn’t bother jumping through all these hoops if she weren't terrified and utterly in love with both her family and her life.
Plus, in a narrative turn that echoes Arthur Miller’s play “All My Sons,” Rocky struggles to reconcile the fact that one of her son Jamie’s clients was the railroad company seemingly at fault in the recent local tragedy.
Rocky has hard, tentative conversations about this with Nick and Willa, and eventually, Jamie himself, who returns home for a visit while grappling with the moral costs of his work. During this visit, Rocky notes, “Jamie didn’t want Miles to die, of course. Nobody did. But his death is starting to feel less like an accident than like the answer to an unholy math problem. Jamie catches my eye and smile, and I smile back reflexively. I’m an undammable river of mother love. I’m a torch-brandishing one-woman mob, and I will go after anyone who casts doubt upon the rightness of my child. Even if that person is me.”
This fierce familial love is the beating heart of "Wreck," and one of the reasons, I'd argue, that readers have taken such a shine to Rocky and her clan.
They're not perfect people, but they know they'll have each other's backs, even when they're scared or tested. And that can't help but give you hope.
