Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes: A Novel
by T Cooper
Dutton. 430 pages, $24.95
IN LIPSHITZ SIX, or Two Angry Blondes, T Cooper writes the story of four generations of the Lipshitz family. In 1903, after an especially horrific pogrom, Hersh and Esther and their four children emigrate from Kishinev, Russia, to the United States. Unfortunately, at Ellis Island, they lose sight of the youngest child, Reuven. Unlike his siblings, he is blond and blue-eyed, and he just disappears into the crowd. Eventually settling in Texas with Esther’s brother Avi, they make a good life for themselves. Their daughter Miriam has a daughter, Anna Rose, and she is the mother of the character T Cooper. In the meantime, Esther develops an obsession with Charles Lindbergh, whom she decides is Reuven, her long-lost son. The obsession drives a wedge between Esther and the rest of her family, especially her husband.
The saga of an immigrant Jewish family that doesn’t settle in New York or another large city is an American story not told enough. Settling in unfamiliar land, assimilating into a gentile community, the family eventually finds its way as business owners. By the third generation, that of Anna Rose, they’re woven into the fabric of the community. Daughter T, however, feels like an alien in Amarillo and escapes to New York City, where she makes her living—or rather, he makes his living—as an Eminem look-alike who deejay’s at Bar Mitzvahs. T is a “transman” who lives with a loving wife within spitting distance of the barren site where once the Twin Towers had stood. T ponders his role as the last of the Lipshitz line with fear and hope. At first he resists the idea of his wife having a baby, but after a medical emergency and a visit back to Amarillo, he makes peace with the past, accepts his inheritance, figuratively and literally, and looks forward to the future. It’s a shame Cooper didn’t have a better editor. The germ of a good story is here, but it’s lost in page after page of minutiae. The structure of the book adds to the problem: chapters go back and forth in time, and while this can be an effective technique, here it serves only to complicate things needlessly. Some of the characters, such as T’s great-uncle Ben and even her brother Sammy, pop up when convenient for the narrative, but they’re not developed in any significant way. Finally, there are no likable characters here, which makes it hard to care what happens to any of them. One technique that does work well is T’s use of newspaper articles, reproduced in text boxes, that tell the story of Lindbergh’s career, as well as other contemporary documents that give the story an authentic feel. Still, it’s never clear to what extent T Cooper the author and T Cooper the character are the same person or share some attributes in common, or none at all. The confusion appears to be by design: T the narrator sometimes says things like, “the above may be true, but it may not be.” There is much cynicism and negativity in this book and not much that’s life-affirming. T Cooper wrote an earlier book Some of the Parts, also a novel about families, which was well received. Perhaps at this stage in life Cooper has turned to writing as a way to resolve family legacies, in which case one can only wish her and him the best of luck.
