Among the Ten Thousand Things
By Julia Pierpont
336 pages;
Random House
Finding out that your spouse has been having an
affair is painful enough; finding out when one of your young children drops off
a box full of printed extramarital sex chats is another order entirely. Julia
Pierpont’s bracing debut novel opens with this explosive
revelation, as former dancer Deborah struggles to keep her life and psyche
together when she learns—via her daughter—that her
artist-husband, Jack, has been cheating on her with an art student. Pierpont
thoughtfully captures Deb’s devastation, which is all the more wrenching when
pitted against Jack’s arrogant rationalizations. (“The girl was a channel that let him be a better man at
home.”) But Pierpont is especially skilled at entering the
minds of the two children unwittingly caught in the mess: 15-year-old Simon,
who’s entering his own sexual coming-of-age, and
11-year-old Kay, who is suffering the taunts of school bullies for her
geekiness, which includes writing Seinfeld fan
fiction. Deb escapes with the kids for a supposedly restorative summer in Rhode
Island, while Jack heads to Arizona to pursue a painting commission; but, the
blast radius of their actions and insecurities is wider than the continental
United States, and Pierpont's killer ending reveals the long reach of the
affair’s consequences (sorry, no plot spoilers). Consider
this a twisty, gripping story—that packs an emotional wallop.
— Mark Athitakis