Full Description
After Moses tells the story of the eccentric Tumarkin family, who must first suffer the loss of its reckless daughter Shoe and then of Moses, Shoe's five-year-old son. Set in a small, southern Ohio town, the novel interweaves the stories of three lonely siblings--Shoe, Johnny, and Ida, a painter and recluse who has never moved out of her parents' house. In Shoe's final will, she tries to cure that loneliness: a wife for Johnny, a son for Ida. But companionship cannot be parceled out like possessions. Johnny will not marry a woman upon demand--even if he happens to love her. Ida will adore her nephew Moses and the tall stranger who walks into their lives, but will they become a family? And what does a young boy do when his parents' worlds collide? After Moses is testament to the fact that love leaves a legacy--and often surprises, too. In order to write this novel, I first had to write my monster novel. I call it that because it's big and unruly, probably an abomination, and I keep it hidden so it never sees the light of day. When it began, my monster novel was about me and some things that happened to me that I needed to make sense of. But in the course of writing it, I never made sense of anything. I wrote chapter after chapter, knowing all the while it was a mistake but stubbornly forging ahead. Somehow I knew that I had to finish that novel before I could move on to anything else. In the end, one story from that novel inspired After Moses. In 1991, while working on my MFA, my friend and I rented a house in Tucson. One day my friend brought home a painting from Value Village, our favorite local thrift store. The painting was of a farmhouse and a field, a fence, a bird. It looked as ifit had been painted by a child. At the bottom it was signed, in block white letters, "Ida Tumarkin." We both loved the painting. Later we were evicted from the house, though, and the painting was somehow lost. In my monster novel, the protagonist, Emily, finds a similar painting in a similar way, gets evicted, and loses the painting. But unlike me, she decides to track down the artist. So I had to invent the artist. And then I realized the artist had a sister. And a brother. By that novel's end I knew them all, and I knew I would write a novel about them and about Emily, who by the end of that book had ceased to be me. I don't know a thing about the original Ida Tumarkin, but I hope she's still painting somewhere. Karen Mockler captures the intimacy, bizarreness, and brilliant complexity of family life with generosity and wisdom. You will love her characters--the distinctive Tumarkin siblings, their parents, beautiful and believable Moses--and they will stay with you long after you turn the last page.--A.S.
