BOOK REVIEWS : Odd, Loving Life Without Father

Sleeping Arrangements by Laura Cunningham (Knopf: $18.95; 195 pp.).

The traditional nuclear family may be an endangered species, but the remarkable uncles in Cunningham’s loving and witty memoir prove that we may have been defining “family” too narrowly. Gabe and Len fill the bill despite their almost complete lack of ordinary qualifications, providing all the care, support, understanding and love Lily needs. You can’t write a book like this if you’ve grown up in a Cape Cod cottage with Mom, Dad, Sis and Junior.

Lily’s early childhood has been peripatetic from birth. Though her high-spirited mother Rosie claims to have been married to a war hero named Larry Moore, he’s an invisible presence from the start; the only evidence of his existence a faded snapshot taken in an office. For Lily’s first eight years, her father’s absence is explained by a war in which he’s a daredevil pilot, a perfectly satisfactory answer until Lily learns that America has been at peace since 1945. Happily for her, the Korean crisis erupts, and the fiction is maintained until Rosie decides that Larry has served his purpose and can die in action. He’s briefly and intensely mourned, but by then, Lily has a vibrant world of her own. After years of being shunted from one relative’s apartment to another, sleeping on sofas, cots, and floors, Rosie has managed to secure an apartment in a then-livable part of the Bronx, and the neighborhood supplies Lily with two marvelously recalled best friends, double the number most children have; triple if you count Rosie, the most adoring, fun-loving mother a girl could want.

When Lily is 8, the Saturday afternoon adventures with Rosie are preempted by dreary sojourns in doctors’ waiting rooms, and then, suddenly, by Rosie’s hospitalization. Rosie’s younger brother, Uncle Gabe, appears, an “old bachelor” at 38, deeply religious but marvelously high-spirited and imaginative. He’s a poet and writer of Jewish gospel songs, a genre for which the market is severely limited. Within a tragically short time, he’s joined by Uncle Len, a 6-foot 6-inch giant of a man, who turns up at midnight, haggard and unshaven, his possessions packed in Manila envelopes. At 40, he’s also unmarried and eccentric in entirely different ways. His materialization indicates that Lily’s mother has died, and together, the ill-matched brothers set about making a home for their niece.

They succeed marvelously, though the home does not begin to fit the standards established either by the neighbors or by the Board of Education. The uncles allow Lily to choose the furnishings for the apartment, acceding to her selection of a gold lame couch and candy-striped walls as if she were a graduate of Otis-Parsons. Breakfast is tuna patties and popcorn, though eventually Uncle Len masters a pressure cooker, performing his chef’s chores in pith helmet and apron. Unlike Gabe, he’s an agnostic, but accommodating and willing to let Lily make her own choice between orthodoxy and pure reason. Neither uncle bothers with non-essentials, nor do they see any reason why she should conform to school standards of grooming, clothing, or attendance. As long as she’s happy, they’re content, having no basis of comparison whatever.

The unexpected arrival of their elderly mother, “Etka from Minsk” complicates matters, but soon everyone adjusts to the presence of a semi-rational woman convinced she’s the most brilliant and beautiful creature on earth. Etka fits right in; her peculiarities causing only minor disruption. She arrives with an elaborate wardrobe and 100 spiral-pad notebooks containing her life’s work, “Philosophy for Women,” the gravamen of which is that Etka was right not to do housework. “She had cleaned her home once and realized that wasn’t for her.” Lily becomes Etka’s editor and typist, agreeing to produce 50 copies of this oeuvre for the sum of $25, which, to a fourth-grader, seems somewhat more munificent than it actually is. Though it soon becomes apparent that Etka suffers from memory lapses and kleptomania, Lily is not only tolerant but helpful, quickly abandoning her romantic image of a cookie-baking, story-reading grandmother and accepting this extraordinary substitute.

Compassion and wit are a rare literary combination, but “Sleeping Arrangements” is illuminated by both. Original, quirky, poignant and hilarious, the book is followed by a brief afterword, in which Cunningham questions the wisdom received from Tolstoy that “Happy families are all alike.” Convinced that joy takes infinite forms but sadness only a few, she proves her point on every page.