Paradise Farm

In the spring of 1929, just before the stock market crash, a young woman struggles to achieve independence from a well-to-do, assimilated Jewish family whose neurotic needs have tremendous psychic impact. Webster (Sins of the Mothers) crafts a coming-of-age tale exploring the psychological underpinnings of a family's dramatic life changes in a historically portentous moment. While Germany slouches toward the Third Reich and the bottom falls out of the U. S. economy, the Kameners face a critical metamorphosis of their own. Eugene, husband of Agnes and father of their two grown children, Lara and Johnnie, is dying and has arranged for his family to move into the small guest house and rent out their opulent New Jersey home to Muriel and David, a pair of psychologists who plan to transform it into a clinic for disturbed children. The uneasy new household, soon minus Eugene and now including Robin, a little girl who's been mute for a year, gingerly forges new interdependencies headed for destruction, or enlightenment. Lara Kamener, a painter searching for her own original style, is a modern young lady with a secret about her intimate childhood relationship with her brother, a sensitive, gifted, out-of-work mathematician with serious emotional problems. Johnnie becomes increasingly obsessed with the news of heightening anti-Semitism in Germany, and finds himself consumed by concerns about the fate of Jewish people; he is cruelly conflicted because his own family are self-loathing Jews, anxious to conceal their ethnic heritage. Webster skillfully portrays this troubled soul as a sage, the only Kamener who comprehends his Jewish identity and sees the encroaching danger. Agnes tries to compensate for her life's disappointments by marrying a young, opportunistic scoundrel. Using a spare prose style resonant with clues to the catastrophic times ahead, Webster deftly conveys a period of social history when women began voicing their sexual needs, unconventional values were infiltrating social norms and new art movements and Freudian psychoanalysis was becoming chic among the intelligentsia. (Mar.) FYI: Webster is president of PEN American Center West. She has loosely based this novel on the life of her mother, modernist painter Ethel Schwabacher.