"I want a house that makes an impression from the street," Eileen tells her realtor. "A house that almost pulls you up into it. A big, impressive house." She can't afford such a house, but her aching desire to occupy a respectable place in the world nags at her constantly.
Matthew Thomas's debut novel We Are Not Ourselves is a heavy one, both literally and figuratively. Clocking in at 620 pages, it follows the life of Eileen Tumulty, revealing through chapter-length vignettes her troubled childhood, her time in nursing school, her marriage to Ed Leary, her relationship with her son, and the family calamity that casts a shadow over her life in middle age. These vignettes provide brief windows that allow the reader to piece together a fully formed image of the character's life. The reader is given a dispiriting portrait of the American dream and left pondering life's priorities, among them status, comfort, and love.
Eileen's immigrant parents never manage to establish themselves financially, and her mother's alcoholism makes Eileen a caretaker early on. As an adult, she fixates of her dream of owning a nice house up in Bronxville, finding it impossible to be satisfied sharing a two-family house in Queens. Her beloved husband, Ed Leary, serves as a stubborn impediment to her hopes with his rigid aversion to change. At a turning point in the novel, the Learys receive a medical diagnosis that changes their lives permanently. At this point, vignettes from Eileen's perspective become interspersed with chapters from the viewpoint of her son Connell, who struggles to assimilate his family's unfortunate situation with his own journey to adulthood. Through the eyes of both Connell and Eileen, the novel forms a full and nuanced portrait of a family in distress. In the end, Connell emerges as a worthy legacy for Eileen and Ed, finding his own path toward a dream he is now old enough to build for himself.
We Are Not Ourselves sweeps sensitively over the grand landscape of the Learys' lives, offering exquisitely drawn details at each stop on the journey. The characters at times experience such depths of human suffering as to make this an emotionally difficult read, but its end offers a philosophic solace that satisfies.
