Sometimes, my mother worries about ninjas. The ninjas can fly, or tunnel underground. If Jeffrey Epstein has been in the news, they might be pedophiles.
They’re trying to take her grandchildren. They might be from Russia. They are almost definitely planning something.
They live across the street. My sister and brother-in-law might be colluding with them, and though my husband and I are not, we are capable of being deceived. It’s not always ninjas; sometimes it’s the CIA.
Sometimes it’s in the pills. Sometimes it’s my baby, who she thinks might not be mine at all. There’s something not quite right about the baby, somehow, though she can’t tell us what.
I read Jonathan Franzen’s more than a decade before my mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. In my early twenties, Enid and Alfred, the aging Lambert parents, were less compelling to me than their three children. Long (long)-suffering Enid is dealing with the myriad disappointments of her life, most acutely that Alfred’s physical and mental facilities are rapidly deteriorating due to Parkinson’s.
I regret to admit that I didn’t find them terribly . Still, after my mother’s diagnosis, I remembered Alfred and his affliction. One of the novel’s most memorable scenes is told from Alfred’s point of view.
He wakes in the middle of the night while on a cruise and hallucinates a (very hostile) talking turd. When I read it the first time, the scene struck me as a little over the top—an almost slapstick mo.
