Thanks to the Minneapolis Star Tribune for a thumbs-up in their book section yesterday:
The Latecomers By Helen Klein Ross. (Little, Brown & Co., 432 pages, $25.98.)
Long-buried family secrets threaten to surface throughout “The Latecomers,” the third novel by Helen Klein Ross. Bridey Molloy, one of the millions of poor Irish flooding into New York’s Lower East Side in the early 20th century, teams up with Connecticut lady Sarah Hollingworth to raise her son. Sarah will be the adoptive mother, Bridey will be the nursemaid, and the two will never tell a soul where Vincent came from.
“Sarah was his mother. She would always be his mother. But he was raised by the woman who’d given him birth,” Ross writes.
Such an uncomfortable alliance brings the expected tensions, but it all could have worked out, if not for the arsenic.
Ross gives the novel an epic sweep of history, ranging from 1908 to 2018, with New York as its epicenter. We watch the convulsions of history, from Prohibition to the Sept. 11 attacks. But the power of the story comes from the interlocking narratives of the family drama, told in turn by Bridey, Sarah, Vincent and their descendants. We inhabit each character and see from their perspectives the intersections of class, gender and privilege.
We learn that there is more than one deep, dark secret at the Hollingworth estate. Indeed, each generation has hidden something from the others. But as in real life, we see that some family secrets can’t be buried forever, no matter how hard people try.
–Maureen McCarthy