“The Latecomer“ is the latest novel by Jean Hanff Korelitz, the best-selling American author, who’s been quoted as saying “I wanted to be a literary novelist but I realised I liked plot“. A liking that’s turned out to be extremely profitable, not just in book sales but also because two have already been adapted for the screen (“Admission“ and “You Should Have Known – televised as “The Undoing” starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant) and another (“The Plot“) is slated for release as a Hulu/Disney+ television series. 

Plot is something Korelitz excels at. Not in the sense of fast-paced action or edge of the seat suspense, but plot that turns on moral and ethical dilemmas. “The Latecomer” offers somewhat of a smorgasbord of moral dilemmas, one of the most compelling being artificial insemination, comically alluded to in references to “the ancestral petri dish”. In terms of theme, one critic noted there is an embarrassment of riches, an extravagance that in a lesser author’s hands could have resulted in compromising the coherence of the book. However not here. 

Sibling rivalry and the implications of sibling birth order are prominent themes, as is family dysfunction. The Oppenheimers are wealthy, privileged, Jewish and beset by seemingly irredeemable emotional disjunctions. Set in New York, between the years of 1972 and 2017, in its forensic dissection of the existential problems that beset Salo Oppenheimer, his wife Johanna, triplets Harrison (the smart one), Lewyn (the weird one), Sally (the girl) and the eponymous latecomer Phoebe, it’s reminiscent of Henry James or Edith Wharton or even Dickens.

For the Oppenheimers (who would qualify as Edith Wharton’s arrivistes) the Gilded Age lives on, as they ride out the storms of familial discord safely ensconced in their luxurious Brooklyn Heights brownstone (bought before the area became fashionable), cushioned by wealth, privilege and an imperviousness to the economic, social and political disruptions that prevail throughout the four or so decades covered by the story, events that occasionally divert them from their various predicaments but never dislodge them from their fictionally pre-ordained lives of ultimate salvation. At least until the finale, where finally something outside their insulated world smashes in with the force of fateful inevitability. 

In a neat take on Tolstoy, Korelitz says in an interview about the book, “all unhappy families are different, but no unhappy family has ever been quite as different as the Oppenheimers”. That all four children were conceived in a laboratory is nicely analogous with the fraternal sterility that separates them from birth. It’s not much of a stretch to link the test tubes and gestational carriers of “unnatural” conception with the particularly frigid relations of the individuals spawned thereby, but it’s a clever deceit on Korelitz’s part.

Korelitz writes in dense, circuitous almost verbose prose, redolent again of nineteenth century fiction. Judging from reviews, this style annoys some readers, but it seems to me perfect for the intricacies of the psychological dramas Korelitz is adept at crafting. Here’s an example:

“Something inside him slipped into place: not love, not a sudden recognition of his own terrible loneliness, not even desire. Only he thought, looking at her, noting the obvious nervousness as she spoke and understanding that she wanted, for some unfathomable reason, his good opinion …”

In the same interview referred to above, Korelitz states the book is not autobiographical in any way, but it does reflect a number of her “personal preoccupations”, for example crazy families, religion, politics, art and hoarders. The last might explain her propensity for clutter in terms of themes and concepts.

Phoebe, the latecomer, through the miracle of reproductive science, is born 17 years after the others, when her mother Johanna decides injecting life into the remaining blastocyst opportunistically preserved in the fertility clinic’s deep freeze might also serve to inject life into her fracturing family. Thereby redemptively hatched, Phoebe in fact does prove the salvation of the Oppenheimers although not in the manner her mother might have predicted.

Another piece of the patchwork quilt of contemporary cultural artefacts woven into the web of Korelitz’s themes is outsider art which features as the compensatory obsession for Salo, the Oppenheimer patriarch. 

It’s the art collector in Salo that fascinates, as much as the art itself. For him, collecting art he loves is essentially a form of sublimation. Alienated emotionally from his wife almost from the beginning of the marriage and from his offspring, he pours his passion into objects, in this case iconic paintings that he buys because he loves them and which fortuitously amass value as the artists and the art movement they define come to world-class prominence, rendering his collection invaluable. Every art collector’s dream.

Unlike the equally invaluable Old Masters Salo had been brought up with in his parents’ apartment (“rheumy apertures to other continents in other centuries”) the new paintings provoke in him “dizziness, confusion, even fainting” a kind of ecstasy he’d never before experienced and an incapacity to look away from the “frantic, scribbled loops of orange and red, relentless swirling in an exhausting scrawl”, a painting called “Untitled” that he discovers is by an American artist called Cy Twombly. His response to the painting is overwrought, out of all proportion to the object itself, but constitutes for him overpowering longing and desire, something that can finally give his life purpose.

Korelitz, in discussing the writing process, has described it as “[opening] up some mystical pathway inside us, making all manner of revelation possible”.

The characters of “The Latecomer”, in stumbling along their various rocky paths towards epiphany, similarly tread their own mystical pathways, where wrong turnings and senseless deviations lead them very close to falling over the cliff. It’s only through the purposeful intervention of Phoebe, the latecomer, that they are saved. Phoebe is the only character whose motivations seem straightforward. All she wants is “a functioning happy family”. Although the circumstances of her birth give her the right to feel “existentially defrauded”, her mother hastens to assure her otherwise. She is not “some random person [they] were saddled with … [she was] their missing piece”. And as such, she not only puts the final touch to the addled jigsaw of the others’ lives but begets a Korelitz version of the “happy ending” beloved of Victorian novels.

A confession: it was during my wanna-be novelist days that I was first attracted to Jean Hanff Korelitz’s books. Several of her books focus on academia, almost all of them feature Jewish characters and social settings and are located in New York. My protagonist, unlikely as it seems now, was a male Jewish academic born and brought up in New York. Given my background (Protestant, non-academic, born and brought up in Australia and of course female) I could hardly have deviated further from “Writing 101” – write what you know. So, I needed JHK’s help. (And a lot more besides but you can read all about that elsewhere.) Along the way I also fell in love with her books and am constantly on the alert for the release of another one.

I’m very grateful to Faber & Faber who provided me with an advance release copy of the book.