Sometimes you have a gut sense as a reader that it took a long time for a writer to summon the courage to tackle a subject. As I read the four-page introduction to SMALL WORLD (Ecco, 304 pp., $27.99), Laura Zigman’s sixth novel, I could practically see her pinch her eyes shut, suck in a breath and say, “Let’s do this.”
What follows is a graceful swan dive into the question of how a family rearranges itself after the death of a child. Is it possible to truly recover? How are survivors supposed to answer the question of how many siblings they have? If you’re an avid acknowledgments reader like me, you’ll learn that Zigman’s oldest sister, Sheryl, died at age 7. “Small World” is definitely a novel, but some details are clearly pulled from real life.
When we meet the Mellishmans in the 1970s, they are a family of five. There’s Lenny, an orthodontist, and his wife, Louise, “who didn’t graduate from college and barely knows how to boil an egg but never takes no for an answer”; and their daughters, Lydia, Eleanor and Joyce. Eleanor, who was born with cerebral palsy and a seizure disorder, dies only a year after her parents reluctantly send her to the Walter E. Fernald State School, once known as the Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded.
Our narrator, Joyce, sums up the aftermath of this loss using the technical term for crooked teeth: “You are born into malocclusion. Into an unlucky family with a disabled child, then a dead child. The hole caused by her absence will eventually cause everything and everyone to shift, and drift, the same way teeth do, after an extraction.” Lenny and Louise never recover; he dies of a drug overdose that may or may not be accidental and she channels her heartbreak into all-consuming activism on behalf of disabled children. Lydia alights for California as soon as she graduates from art school. And Joyce spends as much time as possible at friends’ houses, scrutinizing their framed family photos with the zeal of a detective on the trail of a promising lead.
“Small World” begins when the surviving sisters reunite as adults — middle-aged, divorced, living together in Joyce’s apartment while Lydia sets up her post-marriage life on the East Coast. Their awkward navigation of close quarters and attempts to make peace with their childhood are the sturdy foundation holding up Zigman’s plot. Appropriately, one of her epigraphs is from Adrienne Rich’s “Diving Into the Wreck.”
