A Family Slowly Unwraps Itself, Layer by Layer

IN THE MIDDLE OF ALL THIS

A Novel

by Fred G. Leebron

Harcourt

272 pages, $24

A novel written by a man, about a man and his inner world, offers hope to the rest of us. If all goes well with the storytelling, we come away with a new appreciation for the curious behaviors and strange priorities of an entire species. Why do men act like that? Fred G. Leebron’s “In the Middle of All This” provides some worthwhile pointers.

Leebron has a talent for revealing his characters, men and women, with the sure hand of a builder hammering nails. Martin Kreutzel is a keyed-up anthropology professor and a dedicated family man who can’t bring himself to tell his wife, Lauren, that he loves her. She keeps the pressure off him, attending to the burst water pipes and broken garage doors of life on her own. They share the work of raising Max, the toddler Martin carries around like a favorite teddy bear, and 6-year-old Sarah, who lately avoids holding her father’s hand in public.

These days, Martin also takes care of his sister, Elizabeth, deathly ill in London and married to the wrong man, if you ask anyone in her family. She diets on wheat grass and vitamin pills and resists complaining about each new pain so that Richard, her New Age husband, can go to his Epiphany seminars and meditation hour without feeling guilty. She never used to be so passive when she lived at home in Maryland, right?

At first, this foursome seems wrapped tight, but gradually each one expands like an onion unfurling its layers in heat. Martin’s tendency to drink, preferably 30-year-old scotch or dark beer, gets particularized when he admits his favorite room in the house is the dark bar in the basement.

As Elizabeth grows physically frail she turns emotionally stronger, abruptly cutting ties with her family for fear they won’t let her change. Her steady decline and sudden disappearance send Martin into frequent riffs on the meaning of life. They all run along the same lines. Illness isn’t fair, there’s nobody to blame, everybody gets a turn, no need to feel humiliated. Why do we run from it?

It is Lauren who delivers the closest thing to an answer. Caught up in a family illness, a falling-down house, faculty members on pain pills and suicidal students, she steps outside it just long enough to comment, “I love the idea of life in the middle of all this.” Words that sound like a sigh of relief.

Leebron’s skill at chiseling personalities in careful stages can lull us into false security. Before long Martin and company start opening up, and we are reminded what a mistake it is to judge too quickly even someone as familiar as a wife, sister or brother-in-law.

Quiet little Lauren offers to be a surrogate mother for Elizabeth and Richard. Elizabeth goes from denying her mortality to taking charge of how and where she will die. Richard stuns Martin when they have it out over what a poor excuse for a husband he has been. Or, maybe not. The Epiphany seminars and ashram weekends, the meditations and guru chasings were all for Elizabeth, he says. “All along I’ve been doing what she told me to do. No more. No less. Just exactly what she wants.” Mothers and wives in particular might find themselves reading those lines more than once.

Over the years Leebron, a creative-writing teacher who has published short stories, novels and nonfiction on the craft of writing, has been compared most often to Richard Ford, who writes about men from the inside out. But Martin Kreutzel is a man you’d be more likely to find in a Nick Hornby novel. He is frantic, frazzled, but not an angry depressive, not one of the lost boys at midlife that Ford knows so well.

For all his whining and resisting, Martin is kindhearted and willing to accept limits. He, after all, accompanies Elizabeth to the worst of her doctor’s visits when Richard says he can’t face them. When Martin’s mother calls, he lets her vent about the messes of life and reminds himself to ask after his father. He can’t tell his wife he loves her, but at least he can admit to himself that he does.

For a young man, Martin (who’s 38) spends a lot of time thinking about death. What makes this manageable, even appealing, is the way he does it in the middle of so much living. Rushing back and forth to his sister’s house in London, spending money he doesn’t have, missing classes he should be teaching at home, taking his kids shopping, he forms a few conclusions. One in particular seems likely to stay with him: “These were years that death was everywhere. He had never wanted them to end.”