As a pre-teen, I devoured Judy Blume’s books. I remember well the time I went with my mother to the library and picked out “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret,” one of Blume’s most popular books for adolescents. By then, I had already read the book four or so times.
As we were checking out, the librarian informed my mother that books like these were corrupting the minds of sweet and innocent girls. She moved to put the book back on the cart to be re-shelved.
Mom was furious. She grabbed the book and handed it back to the librarian. “I’m not going to let people like you keep her from reading about boys and training bras,” she said. “She’ll be dealing with them soon enough.”
I’m still not sure if by “them,” she meant puberty or librarians, but that day sticks out as one of the first that I began to wonder why it was that I liked to read certain books. In the case of my beloved Judy Blume books, I was for a very long time unsure. Maybe I loved to read her books merely because I was enthralled by the details of first kisses and first heartbreaks.
So, I wasn’t sure what to expect from Blume’s newest book written for adults, “In the Unlikely Event.”
Though not her first foray into the realm of adult fiction, “In the Unlikely Event” is Blume’s first book for adults in 17 years; in several recent interviews, Blume also admitted that this book was probably her last.
As I get older, I do think that it is Judy Blume’s honesty that draws readers back again and again. But now I realize that it’s not just her honesty about puberty. Blume has an unremarkable knack for capturing, with precision and intensity, incredibly honest details about love, friendship and growing up.
Reading “In the Unlikely Event,” I recognized this same emotional honesty as I slipped into the minds of Blume’s many narrators, identifying with them so effortlessly I didn’t realize it was happening.
“In the Unlikely Event” centers around Miri Ammerman, of Elizabeth, N.J., a ninth-grade Jewish girl living with with her mother, Rusty, who withholds all details of Miri’s father.
The pair live above Miri’s doting grandmother, Irene, and her Uncle Henry, a journalist whose stories and articles are interspersed throughout the novel. Miri is struggling to navigate adolescence with her friend, Natalie Osner, the daughter of a wealthy dentist, and her budding boyfriend Mason, an orphan with a mysterious backstory of his own.
Told rapid fire, in short bursts of chapters, the book switches continuously between the voices of the many, many characters. It is a little disorienting at first, but each and every character is given their own legitimacy in the story. The setting – the early 1950s— peeks throughout the novel with beautiful, spot-on details of Angora sweaters in the refrigerator and basement parties livened up with jazz streaming from the jukebox.
This set up alone would be enough material for a novel, but then, over the course of eight weeks, the town is rocked by three commercial airplane crashes. The book gives these tragic and horrifying events their due respect, but mostly focuses on how these events alter the course, in ways large and small, of all of Elizabeth’s citizens. Suspicion is everywhere; some people cry “communism,” but the ninth-grade girls prefer “sabotage.”
Some people deal with loss by running into the arms of other’s, like Grandma Irene’s new boyfriend, while still others pack up and move away. Everyone, however, is confused and hurt, leaning on each other to figure out how to get through. In short, this is not so much about “What happened?” As “What happened after that?”
Blume is definitely “writing what she knows” here – she herself was a young girl in the ‘50s when three planes crashed over her hometown within a short period of time. And while I think that this story is one that is begged to be told, “In the Unlikely Event” is Blume’s way of writing about how we all are trying to reach our own destinations, forced to reckon with the unlikely events that might happen along the way.
