“And then there is using everything,” Gertrude Stein said of her approach to composition; for Rebecca Kauffman, there’s using everyone. The novelist is interested in congress: Friends reunite, families meet up, exes come together, and there’s something to be seen from each character’s vantage point. Her 2022 novel, “Chorus,” was told from nine points of view. Her narration never stays in the same place — or even the same brain — for too long.
In her fifth novel, “I’ll Come to You,” set somewhere in the American Midwest, we first meet Ellen, a genial, selfless, newly divorced school bus driver, in January 1995, on a reluctant date with a retiree named Gary. She orders chicken, he gets steak; she makes up a story to explain the divorce she still doesn’t understand. By the end of the evening, Gary and Ellen agree he’s “not dating material,” and she has “reached a conclusion: Next Christmas must be spent together, the whole family,” her future grandchild and ex-husband included.
As the clock starts ticking, subsequent chapters spotlight members of Ellen’s extended family: her son, Paul, and daughter-in-law, Corinne, anxious in the early days of their yearned-for pregnancy; Corinne’s father, Bruce, who keeps a notebook of memories and thoughts for the baby amid his cognitive decline; and Corinne’s mother, Janet, who takes pains to give the impression — at least in photos — that she and Bruce are still in their prime. Then there’s Corinne’s brother, Rob, a car salesman whose compulsion for lying brought an end to his marriage.
Though the chapters indicate a monthly chronology, really they take place over single afternoons or evenings, maybe a weekend at most; Kauffman gives us vignettes rather than the wide view. Each scene has its own arc: One starts with a box of Just for Men hair dye and ends with a man asleep next to a jar of pickles; one character takes up God and puts him back down within the span of a car ride. The reader learns to do away with expectations of continuity. Early on, Corinne is shocked to learn a family friend is queer, and his characterization is cringingly homophobic, and then we pivot away just as quickly, never returning to him again.
This peripatetic third-person narration brings to mind Nabokov’s critique of the “perry” — a term he invented (etymologically related, he suggested, to the word “periscope”) for the narrator who serves merely to do the author’s bidding, a tour guide through “the places which the author wishes the reader to visit and meet the characters whom the author wishes the reader to meet.” Every narrator does the author’s bidding, but there are times when it feels like neither Kauffman nor her narrator can say for sure why they’re moving us in one direction or another.
Except, perhaps, for pure entertainment. It might be more apt to say that Kauffman’s narrator functions like a Nintendo character, hopping from one block to another, disappearing down the pipes of a character’s mind. With Kauffman at the controller, we boing ahead a month at a time to meet a new individual and learn what drives, spooks and delights them.
And the joy in this book is something to admire deeply. The “Corrections”-esque pressure of one last Christmas might herald only the hard truths of family togetherness — and Kauffman does provide, with exquisite precision, all the toxic snits, the petty furies, the lure of nostalgia, the gnaw of needs never met. But she insists, too, on granting each character, siloed though they may be, their share of wins.
The delights aren’t cheap, either: Kauffman loves them enough to bestow upon them the genuine, radiant, quiet, don’t blink kind of happiness. She shows us there is room in a novel — as in the heart — for everyone.
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