Something Red by Jennifer Gilmore

Something Red is set in Washington’s affluent white suburbs in the waning days of the Carter Administration. Jennifer Gilmore artfully captures that sluggish time before the fall of the Soviet Union, when despite the Iranian hostage crisis, Americans considered Russians their biggest enemies.

Jennifer Gilmore’s Something Red explores the ways in which relationships and attitudes about family, god, love and country diverged and clashed in this time of disillusionment and cultural drift. The author’s eye and ear (and, it seems safe to assume, memory) for period detail is terrific; most striking, though, is her attention to another of the senses, as food assumes a central significance in the novel.

The main characters are often defined and separated by what they eat (or don’t), and of no small importance is the fact that central figure Sharon Goldstein is a caterer to the power classes of Washington, D.C.; Sharon’s 16 year-old daughter, Vanessa, has recently stopped eating meat and drinking alcohol; her son, Ben, newly departed for Brandeis University, is discovering his Jewish roots and becomes involved in a campus protest centered on the introduction of pork and other non-kosher foods to campus dining halls; and the novel itself opens with a family dinner party Sharon hosts as a send-off for Ben, during which the political and religious fault lines running between and within those assembled begin to surface. Gilmore’s depiction of a dinner table conversation veering toward disaster is note-perfect and skillfully sets the stage for conflicts to come.

It may be hard to believe that the 1979 U.S. embargo on grain exports to the Soviet Union can become, in 2010, the stuff of genuine narrative tension. Here, though, it does, as Sharon’s husband Dennis, an official in President Carter’s Department of Agriculture, finds himself suddenly facing the prospect of no longer making regular visits to Moscow to arrange grain deals; he’s come to love the city and dreads reassignment to Latin America or Asia, places for which he feels no affinity.

Tensions and estrangements small and large are the focus of this engaging, surprising novel. In a truly challenging and soul-trying time, Jennifer Gilmore’s very human and sympathetic characters seek their ways forward, trying to find selves and roles they can live with; the author’s empathy and imagination ensure that their efforts, which yield varying results, provide the reward of satisfying narrative and felt emotional truth.

Something Red; Gilmore, Jennifer; Mariner Books; HMH Books; $14.95