Podcast
Fresh Air
Maureen Corrigan described it as a perfect summer novel about a family gathering at a Cape Cod cottage, noting its humor, nostalgia and vivid portrayal of aging and family dynamics.
Katherine Newman's new novel is called Sandwich and the title also winks at the situation of our main character, Rachel, nicknamed Rocky, who's halfway in age between her young adult children and her...
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Maureen Corrigan described it as a perfect summer novel about a family gathering at a Cape Cod cottage, noting its humor, nostalgia and vivid portrayal of aging and family dynamics.
Katherine Newman's new novel is called Sandwich and the title also winks at the situation of our main character, Rachel, nicknamed Rocky, who's halfway in age between her young adult children and her elderly parents, all of whom crowd into that cottage.
In the opening scene of Sandwich, Rocky's husband, Nicky, stands paralyzed, plunger in hand before the cottage's single overflowing old toilet, and as the vacation week progresses other things also slosh and overflow, revealing messy emotions like anger and shame.
She segues from Nora Ephronstyle comic passages to elegy, using metaphors like a slow leak to describe menopause and the body's changes, and later likens family life to a seesaw balanced deadcenter.
Sandwich is my idea of the perfect summer novel, shimmering and substantive, with a storyline about abortion that she handles in a way I've never encountered in fiction before.