No Book but the World

January 27, 2014
Cohen’s fifth novel following The Grief of Others, which was long-listed for the Orange Prize, makes a strong addition to the growing field of novels involving revolutionary parenting philosophies. Ava Robbins looks back, after her parents’ deaths, on the permissive upbringing that she and her brother, Freddy, received, based on the ideals of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. She comments, “Much later, in college, when my disillusionment with my father was at its most excruciating... I discovered that the great philosopher, my father’s idol and model, had deposited his own five children in a foundling hospital.” Ava finds her way through the enormous freedom she is given, but Freddy runs greater risks, getting into fights during a brief period at public school and accepting dangerous dares from his friends. Ava realizes Freddy is troubled and possibly autistic, but her parents refuse to acknowledge the fact. In adulthood, following the death of her parents, Ava must decide whether she can or should bring Fred back into her life. Occasionally, Cohen strains to create more mystery than is really needed, but her story’s hard and engaging central questions don’t require suspense to capture the reader. Agent: Barney Karpfinger, Karpfinger Agency.

February 15, 2014
A brother and sister with unconventional childhoods grow into adulthood, with predictably quirky results. Ava and Fred Robbins grow up under the tutelage of their parents, June and Neel, the latter of whom had established an experimental school in upstate New York in the late 1940s. Neel is 20 years older than his wife, and they both believe in a Rousseau-ian ideal of freedom for their children as well as for the students in their school. (In fact, the title of the novel comes directly out of a quotation from Emile, Rousseau's novel of education.) As a consequence, both Ava and Fred grow up making major choices about their own upbringings. As a child, Ava's best friend is Kitty, whose older brother Dennis becomes enamored of Ava when she's a coltish 14-year-old, and years later they marry. Ava's placid domestic life is severely disrupted when she finds out that Fred has been arrested on several charges involving the disappearance and death of a 12-year-old boy named James Ferebee, whose body was recently found. Counsel for Fred is an overworked and underexperienced public defender who can scarcely be bothered with the details of the case, including finding time to visit his client in jail and get his side of the story. Growing up, Fred had always been strange and alienating, exhibiting symptoms of Asperger's or perhaps something further on the autism spectrum, though Ava can hardly imagine him as a killer. Through substantial flashbacks to their childhoods, adolescences and early adult lives, Ava is always looking to put the family narrative into some kind of meaningful whole, though Fred's arrest and incarceration severely challenge this attempt to find coherence. Cohen is finely attuned to family dynamics here, both the quiet inner workings of Ava's successful marriage and her genuine bewilderment about Fred's fall from grace.

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March 1, 2014
Ava and Fred, the adult siblings at the heart of Cohen's (The Grief of Others, 2011) new novel, have been shaped by their unusual upbringing. The children of the founder of a now-defunct experimental school and his much younger wife, they have never quite fit in. Ava is withdrawn and reserved, while Fred, an odd, developmentally disabled child, grew into a man who lives on the fringes of society. When Fred is accused of murdering a 12-year-old boy, Ava tries to piece together what happened and ascertain whether Fred is innocent. Much of the story takes place in the past, peeling back the layers of Ava's and Fred's childhoods: their friendship with free spirit Kitty, whose older brother Dennis becomes Ava's husband, and the fantasy world they created in the woods. Fred's otherness never falls away, and as an adult, Ava distanced herself from him and her past in an attempt to live a so-called normal life. Cohen offers a complex, tragic examination of how difficult it can be to ever truly know and understand another person.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)