In fact there’s not a little bit of Lethem in the novel’s distinctly New York setting, and in its many metaphysical wanderings beyond those walls - though Franzen may be a closer Jonathan, at least in the ways that Row ( “Nobody Ever Gets Lost”) seems to go almost subcutaneous in his examination of the damage that the nuclear unit of spouses and siblings, parents and offspring can do. A glowing cover blurb from Jonathan Lethem extols how Row, who promptly breaks the fourth wall on the ninth page, “explodes the family saga from within.” You have been warned. It’s also more than a single book, even one guided by a keen and careful hand, can adequately contain: a Gordian knot of domestic melodrama, global politics and high-flying philosophy told in multitudinous forms not limited to voice memos, free-verse poetry and unsent emails. It’s all richly imagined, reflexively neurotic and frequently quite dazzling. (The impetus for everything, naturally, is a wedding.) Incest eventually enters the chat, an assiduous but uninvited guest, and race hovers over it all, a quivering question mark. Death and divorce are a given immigration, climate change and crises of faith crowd the margins, clambering to compete with a thousand-year conflict in the Middle East. But even the staunchest Russian novelist might be hard pressed to match the particular gift for dysfunction that the Wilcoxes, subjects of Jess Row’s sprawling metafiction “The New Earth,” display with such impressive esprit de corps across nearly 600 dense and often wildly discursive pages. Officially, there is no hall of fame for unhappy families.
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