A sequel to perhaps the most joyful read of 2024? Sign me up!
“Wreck” takes place about a year after Catherine Newman’s “Sandwich.” We rejoin a writer named Rocky and her hilarious family. There’s husband Nick who, when Rocky is freaking out about a rash she’s sure will kill her, calmly agrees to retire her favorite Christmas tradition when she succumbs: “Okay, no stockings if you die.” There’s anxious daughter Willa, who always seems to end up in Rocky and Nick’s bed with them, even though she’s in her early 20s. There’s reliable son Jamie, who has moved out of the family’s Massachusetts home but not out of its every waking thought. And there’s Rocky’s 90-something dad, who has a lot of trouble with BritBox.
Two major events affect all of the characters, and they respond in their own unique ways. The book’s title refers to both: Rocky’s skin condition, which obsesses her as it proves worrisomely difficult to diagnose. And a car/train crash that kills a young man, raising moral issues for everyone in the family.
But, just like “Sandwich,” “Wreck” is really about having some excellent hang time with these amiable people. I suppose Newman could be criticized on the grounds that all of the characters have similar senses of humor, randomly quoting movies and books (“I am as merry as a schoolboy!” cries Rocky, whose family apparently loves “A Christmas Carol” enough to get the reference). But I think that’s the point, that these people have spent so much time together that they know and enjoy all of the same things.
They’re constantly cracking jokes — I noted that there were about three laughs per page in “Sandwich” and there are at least that many again in “Wreck” — but, even more than in her previous book, Newman makes sure that her characters and her readers are aware that the time we’re eavesdropping on is precious. The events of “Wreck” are decidedly un-momentous — making pancakes, stuffing a turkey, fixing a wayward ceiling fan — but, like the ordinary day in Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town,” they add up to beautiful, even remarkable, lives.
“Wreck” is less about resolving the two big issues than each of the characters making peace with the fact that those issues are sad, disruptive things that humans can’t do much about. Toward the end of the book, Rocky goes for a walk and muses, “I’m as alive as I’ve ever been and somebody’s child is dead, and an owl hoots from the tippy-top of a white pine like it’s answering a question I haven’t even thought to ask.”
It’s a wise book, in addition to being a funny one, particularly in a near-the-end scene when Rocky jokes that all she wants is “everyone I love staying well and safe forever and me living to see it. Just that one measly little wish,” before visiting an acupuncturist. She sticks needles all over Rocky — who, the acknowledgments reveal, is at least partly based on Newman — while helping her figure out why fear and pain, both the physical and the emotional kind, are such an important part of being a human.
Wreck
