The Promise of a Normal Life

  

I received a copy of this release from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Title: The Promise of a Normal Life 

Author: Rebecca Kaiser Gibson

Publisher: Arcade

Release Date: 2.7.23

Publisher’s Summary 

For readers of Marilynne Robinson, Elizabeth Strout, and Katie Kitamura, the indelible journey of a quiet young woman—the “silent person” in the Seder—finding her way.  

Hailed as “radiant and transporting” (Margot Livesey), The Promise of a Normal Life is a poet’s debut novel, so evocative of life as lived that it transports you to a time and place you can practically see, touch, and feel. The unnamed narrator is a fiercely observant, introverted Jewish-American girl who seems to exist in a private and separate realm. She's the child of a first-generation doctor and lawyer—whose own stories have the loud grandeur of family legend—in an America where Jews are excluded from the country club across the street. Her expectations for adulthood are often contradictory. In the changing landscape of the 1960s, she attempts to find her way through the rituals of life, her geography expanding across the country, across the ocean, and into multiple nations.

Along the way, she meets a glamorous hairdresser on a cruise ship to Israel, loopy tarot-card-reading passengers, and Alice-in-Wonderland lawyers in Haifa. There’s a blue-eyed all-American college boyfriend, a mystified tourist agent in the Lofoten Islands, a handsome eligible rabbi in LA, a righteous and self-absorbed MIT professor, and a clandestine, calculating lover in Boston. Eventually, she finds her own compass, but only after being swept to several distant shores by many winds.

My Review

I found this novel to be transportive but suffocating. The unnamed Jewish-American narrator is the child of a first-generation doctor and lawyer, questioning her place in her family and the world in the 1960s. Her mother is both cold and inattentive while simultaneously controlling. When meeting her future mother-in-law, she "was struck by how much Tom’s mother seemed to admire her son. I didn’t know how to understand a mother who made room for her child’s maturity." The Promise of a Normal Life takes place in a world of privilege but the narrator is unsure of every step. She drifts from her family home to her marital home in a haze, but like many women of her time, she can't quite put her finger on why she's unhappy or even decide what she wants. The author's poetry background shines through in this novel's writing. 

I recommend this to someone looking for a quiet read, or as part of the publisher's summary suggests "for readers of Marilynne Robinson, Elizabeth Strout, and Katie Kitamura, the indelible journey of a quiet young woman—the 'silent person' in the Seder—finding her way."