In Steven Amsterdam’s debut collection, Things We Didn’t See Coming, he entertained me with a dystopian reality that wasn’t quite The Road bleak, but had its moments of despair. His writing in those stories was smooth, sparse, and comfortably minimal. He dressed the characters with cinematic clarity, free of cliché. He has written a novel that combines these skills, and with What The Family Needed, we bask in the sunlight of a family with superpowers. We visit different points on a family tree, and with each chapter Amsterdam unearths the great pleasure their tricks, skills, and varnished talents that sometimes curse as much as they help.
At first it’s difficult to wrap your mind around Giordana, a sexy teenager that arrives with her family to live in a house owned by her Aunt Natalie and Uncle Peter. Her cousin Alek asks her which she’d like “to be able to fly or to be invisible?” It’s a funny little moment, Giordana has just witnessed her parent’s violent divorce, and is forced to shack up with her mother’s side of the family. She decides that it would be better if she can be invisible. This allows her to slip around the new home with a kind of silent authority that I found really invigorating.
Her brother Ben evolves in this new structure, which means he needs a superpower, so he decides he will fly. Alek’s older brother Sasha is there too, shy and pensive. But we won’t know what his power is until we meet him years later.
What’s Alek’s power? That’s something to savor and you have to wait patiently for it. By the time we meet Alek as an adult, he has become a loose end, someone who isn’t content with staying in one place, and leaves his family for long stretches of time. But he’s left them all with a superpower. That’s the trick. No one knows it’s Alek, not even Alek, but when I figured it out, or made that leap, it was quite a moment.
Giordana seemed magnetic to me. Early on, she visits her friends whom she dearly misses, because she’s been forced by her mother to leave town, abandoning her drunken father at home alone. She visits her friends, a chattering coven, and makes her presence known, then does the same thing with her lonely and broken drunk of a father. The feelings are really crisp, so precise, but poignant. She wants to show her friends that she still matters, and her father most know that she wants him to change.
Her brother Ben marries, becomes a stay at home Dad, and suffers. It seemed like Ben stuffed himself into a life he thought he wanted, but when he realized he had no talent other than being able to fly, but can’t tell anyone, or, well, he does, but she doesn’t really believe him, until he shows her. The “her” here is almost inconsequential, until it’s not. Watching him fly around town, seeing what he sees is just magical, and totally believable.
I loved watching Natalie realize her talent, while her husband Peter doesn’t know that she is sneaking a peek at their son Alek’s diary. She is a bored and full of mischief. The writing in the Natalie chapter soars above almost everything, except the Alek chapter, which is rich with myth and mystery, even a little sorrow.
Ruth, Giordana’s mother, has power that can only be a curse, she doesn’t have long in this book, and seems only around to have Alek bounce off her, but her section is a searing corner of a larger tapestry, and it is hard to think about the rest of your life once you read it. It really has that overwhelming power. She is lonely and Amsterdam manages to find richness in that, even if it’s minimal.
Where does this family end up? How does Alek turn out? Does Natalie matter? What about Sasha? Does anyone find love or happiness? There are lots of little things in this book that would be unfair of me to give away. All this to say, you should find your way into these lives as soon as possible, as each chapter will give you a new-found respect for Amsterdam’s storytelling power.