The First Desire: A Novel - Hardcover

Reisman, Nancy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375423087 ISBN 13: 9780375423086

Publisher: Pantheon, 2004

Synopsis

1929. Buffalo, New York. A beautiful July day, the kind one waits for through the long, cold winters. Sadie Feldstein, née Cohen, looks out her window at the unexpected sight of her brother, Irving. His news is even more unexpected, and unsettling: their elder sister, Goldie, has vanished without a trace.

With Goldie’s disappearance as the catalyst, The First Desire takes us deep into the life of the Cohen
family and an American city, from the Great Depression to the years immediately following World War II. The story of the Cohens is seamlessly told from the various perspectives of siblings Sadie, Jo, Goldie, and Irving—each of whose worlds is upended over the course of the novel, the smooth veneer of their lives giving way to the vulnerabilities and secrets they’ve managed to keep hidden—and through the eyes of Lillian, the beautiful woman their father, Abe, took as a lover as his wife was dying. But while Abe’s affair with Lillian stuns his children, they are even more shocked by his cold anger in the wake of Goldie’s disappearance.

The First Desire is a book of great emotional power that brings to life the weave of love, grief, tradition, and desire that binds a family together, even through the tumultuous times that threaten to tear it apart.

About this title

About the Author

Nancy Reisman is the author of House Fires, a short story collection that won the 1999 Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her work has appeared in, among other anthologies and journals, Best American Short Stories 2001, Tin House, and The Kenyon Review. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She lives in Ann Arbor, where she currently teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan.

From the Back Cover

"Reisman writes beautifully, a prose of restraint and grace. The achievement of this novel is that you are completely inside it from the moment you begin . . . This is a story that has the shape of life as it is truly lived."
- Anna Quindlen, Book-of-the-Month Club News

"This is a stealth novel. The characters creep up on you, and before you know it you are inhabiting their world, attuned to intimate details, desires and desperate measures invisible to outside eyes. A lovely read."
- Ann-Marie MacDonald, author of Fall on Your Knees and The Way the Crow Flies

"Nancy Reisman's first novel is an exquisitely detailed tapestry depicting a small era in the life of one family. How beautifully she writes about the subtle dramas that roil for decades among parents and siblings, about the ways in which the commitment of kinship can make people deeply, unavoidably intimate yet often just as blind to one another's vices, failings, and secret desires. It is a book written with the wisdom bestowed by heartbreak and the complex poetry of truth."
- Julia Glass, author of Three Junes

"I had been wondering for a while when I might be moved and completely engaged by a novel. The First Desire has broken a long dry spell. And for that I thank Nancy Reisman. What a gorgeous book she has given us. Every moment in The First Desire feels earned. Reading this novel is a rich, complicated, absorbing and altogether transformative experience: tears are still stinging my eyes. I love this book."
- Dani Shapiro, author of Family History

"Nancy Reisman has written a book in which the sentences are so lush, the characters are so vivid, and the story is so compelling, I felt I had stepped inside the world she created and had taken up residence. I want to tell you how much I loved it there. The First Desire is not a book to be merely read. It is a book to be lived."
- Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto

"Like Virginia Woolf's The Years, this rich tapestry - a first novel, amazingly - captures both the overarching history of a family and the deepest emotions of each of its members. Reisman is a wonderful writer."
- Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever

"There is not a false move in Nancy Reisman's The First Desire, one of the best tales I have ever read both about belonging to a family and about what the book calls 'the second desire,' the wish to be invisible, to disappear from that family, and to vanish into the American landscape."
- Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love

"Nancy Reisman's The First Desire is, simply, the most beautifully written novel I've read in ages, a book that is as merciless and tender as real life. There's something of the work of Sue Miller and Alice Munro in this wonderful book: Reisman's characters are people who will live in your head for a long time after reading The First Desire. She writes better than anyone about the small heartbreaks and large tragedies of family life - what you give up to stay in a family, and what you give up to leave."
- Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Giant's House

"The First Desire is a debut novel of startling assurance and poise; it takes that complicated subject, family, and makes of it a layered skein and braided narrative. Nancy Reisman gives us characters who cross the continent and ocean, but the heart of this heartfelt story beats in Buffalo, New York. In prose both lyric and precise she offers a series of studies of women and men together, alone, and their several solos amount to a chorale. This is what Yeats meant by 'dying generations at their song,' and it should be widely read."
- Nicholas Delbanco, author of What Remains

"Nancy Reisman's is a gentle sensibility, an ostensibly soft impressionism that is also a hard, deft, precise, odd and dreamlike logic. The First Desire is as compelling as a dream, a good one, perfectly weird and true."
- Padgett Powell, author of Edisto

"The First Desire really is extraordinary work. The prose is consistently lovely - I'd say elegant or graceful, but somehow those over-used terms feel almost inadequate. There's a kind of shocking beauty to the sensuousness of the language - a startling gorgeousness that goes beyond mere elegance or grace. I suspect that's the key to the rich intimacy of the characterizations which lie at the core of the book. To get beneath the skin, to climb into the very hearts of such a range of figures, and at such a remove of years, is a remarkable achievement, and the spark breathed into these varied characters brings their family, their community, the whole mid-century bustle of Buffalo, to burning life. In short, this feels, to me at least, like the kind of book that can (and should) win prizes."
- Peter Ho Davies, author of Equal Love

Reviews

Disappearing girls have figured in some of the most haunting novels of recent years, from The Virgin Suicides to The Lovely Bones. What happens, though, when the girl is not dead or abducted but has chosen to vanish? This is the premise of Nancy Reisman's gorgeous first novel, which follows a Buffalo family over the course of two decades after the day Goldie, the oldest of five siblings, "went shopping and didn't come back."

After their mother died, a year before the start of the novel, Goldie assumed the role of matriarch. Her disappearance sets off a low vibration of disturbance among the rest of the family, who slowly become unmoored in her absence. Celia is "touched" -- mentally ill, retarded or a bit of both. The responsibility for her care now falls to Jo, who chokes with resentment toward her sister for closing off her own means of escape: "There was a hidden doorway, and Goldie found it first, walked through and shut the door." Irving, the restless baby of the family, approaches the edge of serious trouble while never quite crossing it, stealing petty cash from their father's store to cover his gambling debts and masquerading as a traveling businessman to pick up women. Meanwhile, Sadie, the only sibling to have married and left the childhood home, must face becoming a mother and bringing up her two daughters in the absence of her own beloved mother and sister.

"What did they do that kept [Goldie] so far she'd pass for dead?" Sadie asks herself. This unanswerable question hangs over the book's rich, melancholy atmosphere, a continuing testament to the paradoxical ease with which family ties unravel. What is finally most shocking about Goldie's desertion is how easy it is simply to walk away. When Goldie herself eventually resurfaces -- to the reader, if not yet to her family -- she has moved to California to begin a new life, working as a waitress and living alone, unencumbered by domestic attachments. She remembers the family home, even when empty, as filled with "a low buzzing . . . a pervasive, staticky hum," and trying to "imagine the buzzing and family voices as water; in water she could hear the beginnings of silence." Even afternoons with her lover, a piano teacher, offered only temporary relief from the tedious pains of domesticity. "What he knew was the ecstasy of lovemaking, piano sonatas," Goldie thinks when he asks her to marry him. "The quiet of his father's house, not the chaos and chafing and illness delivered with infants, or the ways men wander."

If the primary human desire, as Goldie muses in a flashback before her desertion, is for familial closeness, the longing to flee that embrace runs a close second. In the world of these characters, no intimacy, sexual or familial, is powerful enough to resist the forces that push people apart. In one of the book's most agonizing episodes, Jo becomes infatuated with another secretary in the office where she works and brutally sabotages the woman's work after learning that she is engaged. Irving, serving in the Army in England during World War II, falls in love with a local girl and promises to marry her, then deserts her without a word of farewell. Ironically, the closest the novel comes to a vision of enduring love is the relationship between Abe Cohen, the siblings' father, and Lillian Schumacher, the "tart" (as the sisters call her) with whom he cheated on their mother.

Lillian, during sex, likes to picture "her fingers slipping past a man's ribs, palm cupping his heart," an image that perfectly describes the way Reisman delves to the innermost core of her characters. This saga of isolation unfolds in a narrative that allows the reader the utmost proximity to the strangers within it. Roaming among their interior monologues, the novel provides an up-close view of the characters' own estrangement from one other, their misunderstandings and disconnections. At times Reisman's tone has a directness and a sensuality reminiscent of Virginia Woolf, from Sadie's domestic peace -- "Here is her coffee, the morning paper; in the back hall there are red geraniums to plant in a window box" -- to Lillian's bold carnality. This approach does have certain limitations: When the war in Europe is introduced in the background, the characters feel too self-involved for their anxiety to be believable. But otherwise the novel's psychological realism is impeccable.

In today's post-Oprah book market, first novels tend to provoke fear in the hearts of publishers, who respond by marketing them too aggressively or not at all. The First Desire, impressively emblazoned with blurbs from heavyweights such as Anna Quindlen and Ann Patchett, is a symptom of the former. The inevitable comparisons evoked by such efforts to create buzz do Reisman no service. Her intensely affecting and thought-provoking work easily stands on its own.

Reviewed by Ruth Franklin
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Critics generally applaud The First Desire as a triumph of style over substance—not that the novel lacks emotional depth. Rather, it’s Reisman’s ability to enliven a dark, forbidding story with skillful writing that critics viewed as a great accomplishment. Her use of a serial narrative betrays a hint of Reisman’s skill for short fiction (her collection House Fires won the 1999 Iowa Short Fiction Award), but it is never a disservice to the story. In fact, the author’s ability to inhabit multiple characters is widely praised. Though The First Desire is not for fans of picaresque narratives, those who enjoy (estranged) family sagas will enjoy the novel.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Reisman's first novel (after the prize-winning collection, House Fires) is mesmerizing, not because of the action of the plot, which is minimal, but because Reisman demonstrates a rare, poetic understanding of family dynamics. The catalyst for this narrative about the hidden dramas of a Jewish family living in Buffalo from the late 1920s to 1950 occurs offstage. Rebecca Cohen, wife of jewelry store owner Abe, has died, leaving five adult children. Goldie, the eldest, on whom the responsibility for caring for her siblings has fallen, suddenly disappears without a word. Her departure leaves Sadie Cohen Feldstein, the only married sister, to cope with her tyrannical father and difficult siblings, who live together in the family home. Celia is mentally unstable, prone to misbehavior in public. Jo is rude, moody and fiercely resentful of having to protect Celia. Handsome, spoiled Irving is a wastrel and compulsive gambler, too fond of cards, whiskey and women. Abe, the paterfamilias, escapes his family into the arms of Lillian Schumacher, a fallen woman. Goldie's disappearance is also an escape, though the family fears she is dead. Irving escapes his gambling debts by joining the army in 1940. The others yearn to flee their responsibilities, but the years roll by until another family crisis brings Goldie home. The echoing word in the narrative is loneliness, used to signify each character's inchoate longings for connection, understanding, "touching" (another signal word) and love. Reisman writes with beauty and precise imagery; she describes one character's personality as "carp under ice, nibbling ancient disappointments." This realism, subtly laced with tenderness and compassion, distinguishes a novel whose addictive embrace continues after the last page has been turned.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The bonds of family are like spiderwebs: deceptively delicate but tough beyond all reason should we try to break them. When Goldie Cohen, 33, goes missing following her mother's death and her father's hasty attachment to the town vixen, the family begins to unravel. Spanning 21 years, from the late 1920s to the '50s, Reisman's debut novel provides a glimpse into a splintered Jewish Russian immigrant family in upstate New York. Told from the alternating perspectives of the various Cohen children, the story reveals the ways in which Goldie's memory lingers and lays bare the distances deepening between the rest of the family members. Sadie, a young wife and mother, takes on the family burden once managed by her older sister: her reckless brother, imbalanced sister, and recalcitrant father, whose expectations and silences engulf them all. Reminiscent of Julia Glass' Three Junes (2002), the novel portrays a subtle dance of interdependence and disconnection. In luminous prose that showcases a cacophony of voices, Reisman exposes how our families can be "the most familiar of strangers." Misha Stone
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1
Sadie 1929

July, the air grassy and mild, the sort of morn- ing Sadie waits for through the deep of Buffalo winters—mornings when it seems the city has surrendered to pleasure, to color and light. The harsh seasons are unimaginable. It’s as if this is how all of life is meant to be; as if drinking coffee and reading, gardening and casual piano playing, are her true occupations; as if cardinals flashing through the yards and the lush green of lawns and the maple’s fat leaves signal a permanent arrival. There are dahlias on the dining table, yellow and red, late strawberries. It’s still early, and Sadie has an hour, maybe two, before the day’s obligations intrude. The easy time, she thinks, the garden time. It’s something she associates with marriage—not the image of a couple in the garden, but the luxury of time alone at her own house. A luxury apparent only after her mother’s death, for which of course there is no compensation; but here is the second summer of such mornings, a time not yet occluded by children. She is twenty-four years old. Here is her coffee, the morning paper; in the back hall there are red geraniums to plant in a window box. The day is already bright, and she opens the living room drapes to the grass and pansies and oaks, and stops. There’s a man on her lawn: light brown suit, cigar in hand, facing away from her. Slim and coltish, an impatience in his stance, a lack of definition she usually associates with faces but here sees even in the posture, the lines of his shoulders. It’s Irving, her baby brother.

She glances at the new aqua-colored divan. The smallest of diversions, the look away. Close the curtains, she thinks, try again later. As if he will vanish. As if in ten minutes or an hour she’ll open the curtains onto a lawn empty of everything but border pansies and white petunias. Pretend the man on the lawn is instead a strolling neighbor pausing to relight his cigar. Because the cigar is out. But Irving makes no gesture to relight it, and he is in fact Irving: Sadie has only one brother and there is no mistaking him. Irving, whom she did not expect to see at all today, let alone at this hour, miles from the family house, dampening his shoes in the grass.

She wishes it were noon. She wishes he were standing in a coffee shop: she is often happy to see him in coffee shops, in the company of pastry. They could eat Danish and argue about new pictures, and Irving could imitate Chaplin, walking with fast small steps and tipping his hat to make her laugh. Irving on the lawn cannot be a good thing.

In her nightgown and robe she opens the front door. A spread of bright petunias hems the grass. “Irving?”

He turns, ashes the burnt-out cigar, checks the bottom of his shoes, as if he has stepped in something unpleasant. For an instant he’s a puzzled tan flamingo. And then he is Irving again, but he doesn’t look her in the eye. What? A death? He’d have spoken by now if it were, and no one’s been ill; there’s evasion in his manner, but not the air of drowning. That half-embarrassed staring at his shoe—it’s more than a small gambling debt. A girl in trouble? Which would be dreadful, of course, more than a little shocking, but not out of character.

“Have some coffee,” Sadie says. And now he glances at her—still the puzzled look—crosses the thick grass, wipes his shoes on the front mat, and follows her voice through the hall to the din- ing room. She seats him at the head of the table, makes a ritual of pouring the coffee, stirring in the sugar and cream. He could be like this when he was a boy, couldn’t he? Quiet, half-elsewhere until he’d had his breakfast, though at her table he fidgets, toying with his spoon until she sits down next to him.

“Haven’t seen Goldie, have you?” he says.

Goldie, their oldest sister. Goldie, who lives with him, with their father and the others. “Goldie?”

“Hasn’t been home for a while. Three days, actually.”

“What do you mean?”

“She went out—to shop, I think, or Celia thinks. She had a shopping bag with her, Celia said.”

“But Celia doesn’t know.”

“No. Celia doesn’t.”

“But she thinks Goldie went shopping.”

“Went shopping and didn’t come back.”

“Three days ago.”

“Well, two or three days.”

“Three days ago was Sunday. Where does she shop on Sunday? She’s never shopped on Sunday.”

“She went somewhere then. Maybe”—and here Irving hesitates—“maybe to the Falls.”

“And didn’t come back,” Sadie says.

“No.”

“She often does go to the Falls,” Sadie says. “Often has.”

She pours more coffee, and focuses on the burgundy rings edging the saucers, the lips of the cups. One teaspoon of sugar for Irving. “Did she go to the Falls alone, or go shopping alone, whatever it is she did?”

He shrugs.

“No one called? No one came by for her?”

He fiddles with the unlit cigar. “I was out. I wasn’t there.”

“For three days you were out.”

“More or less,” he says. “Asleep when I was there.”

“But you must have noticed.”

“Goldie harps,” he says. “I avoid her.”

. . .

other members of the family are prone to disappearing, usually in absurd ways. Celia’s age means nothing—she’s twenty-seven but impulsive—and she turns up on docked streetcars and in speakeasies and sometimes at barbershops after following men. When Irving disappears, he returns whiskey-soaked. But Goldie’s smart, the oldest, the responsible one, thank God uncrazy: she does not disappear. Maybe she told Celia she’d visit a friend and Celia forgot. Or Celia changed the story, blending it with other stories, as is her habit. And anyway what does shopping mean? On a Sunday in a city bursting with Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, a city bound to Sunday as the Lord’s day. True, Goldie might have gone to a Jewish shop, or to the bakery: Celia could mean bakery by shopping. Sometimes you have to unravel Celia’s code. Last year she called Goldie’s piano lessons harbor walks.

Sadie hesitates. The crisis has begun and will be with them now. But she can stir the sugar in slowly, she can wait and drink coffee and slowly dress and then the control of speed will end, all control will end. She’ll have to give over to this thing, this disappearance and its ripple effects, to the strangeness of her other sisters, to her father’s strong will or denial—you never know which it will be—to Irving wandering and returning, with rumor and inebriation. Give over and do what must be done. Do not speculate.

So she delays. The two of them, Sadie and Irving, sit leisurely over coffee, suspend the moment, as if nothing is happening and someone else is actually in charge. July. There’s a brief ease that feels lifted from childhood, when she and Irving seemed a family within the family—a relaxed, affectionate little clan apart from their older sisters. Yet even as Sadie recognizes the sensation it fades, and she offers him jam and toast, the newspaper to read while she dresses for the day.

Alone in her bedroom, she senses that the morning has already become brittle and opaque, as if coated with burned milk. There’s a bright fast ribbon of glee at the thought of canceling dinner with her mother-in-law, then the brittleness again.



it’s a couple of miles to the family house on Lancaster, far enough to be another neighborhood, another set of shops and parks and schools if not a distinctly separate life. But often returning to Lancaster causes time to slip, and she needs to be mindful: she needs the linen dress and gold clip earrings, the lipstick and heels and whatever else she can summon. From the outside, the Lancaster house is disarming, a solid, well-kept wood-frame, off-white, surrounded by clipped green lawn and old elms, the shade of maples and oaks and the clean-swept front porch suggesting restful lives. Today the house is quiet, the foyer, the hallway and front parlor slightly disordered, but only that. The smell of burnt coffee wafts in from the kitchen; the house is alive with the smell. Her sisters always seem to drink coffee burnt, as if there is no other way. As Sadie passes the shaded dining room, the dark woodwork and table and cabinets hushing the place into a season other than summer, Irving hangs behind her and it seems—is she imagining this?—that she might turn and find herself alone.

“Where are they?” she says.

Irving’s examining his wing tips again. “The store. Papa’s at the store.”

She pictures her father—impeccable in a light brown suit, his dark shoes and spectacles and pale forehead shining in the heat, salt-and-pepper mustache exactingly trimmed—checking velvet-lined jewelry cases for dust, squinting at smudges on the glass. “For how long?”

“He expects me there later.”

“He opened for the day?” But her father has done as much at other times, worse times, leaving a pale gray blur in his place. From the parlor there’s a glint of orange, which travels in Sadie’s direction: Celia’s cat, slinking through the hall, now sniffing at Sadie’s pumps. “And Jo? What happened to Jo?”

Irving doesn’t answer. The orange cat presses against Sadie, rubbing itself across her shin, turning, rubbing itself the other way. This is distracting: a tingling runs up Sadie’s leg to the rest of her, pleasant and more pleasan...

Edition details

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375423087
• ISBN 13: 9780375423086
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320