OPEN DOORS

Author: Gloria Goldreich ISBN: 9780778325437 11/2008 FICTION Publisher: MIRA

Family is complicated. Love isn't. Acclaimed artist Elaine Gordon can't believe her loving husband is gone. After a lifetime spent utterly devoted to her soul mate and their marriage, Elaine is now tetherless, faced with widowhood and all the decisions that come with it, not least of which is what to do with her rambling, now-empty family home. Anxious to console their mother in her time of grief, Elaine's four grown children urge her to put everything on hold and spend some healing time with them. But visiting each unique and complicated child opens Elaine's eyes to the fact that the children she raised have become adults she hardly knows: Sarah, who abandoned Western life for an Orthodox enclave in Jerusalem; Lisa, Sarah's accomplished twin and polar opposite, who will do anything for a child of her own; Peter, trapped in a hollow marriage in California; and Denis, the youngest, who just wants Elaine to accept his gay lifestyle. As Elaine tries to bridge the physical and emotional miles, her eyes are opened to the startling truths of her own family, and what she must do to come to terms with her kids' lives—and a future that's completely, wonderfully ...hers.

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

As Gloria Goldreich's contemporary novel OPEN DOORS opens, Neil Gordon suffers a fatal brain aneurysm, but not until his four children make it home to Westchester, New York. As their week of sitting shiva to mourn the loss of Neil draws to an end, the two daughters and two sons have all invited their mother, Elaine, to visit them for an extended time so she can get to know them as adults while she decides what to do and where to live for the rest of her life. Over the next year and a half, Elaine does just that, and finds that all of the things she and Neil thought they were providing for their children in response to what they themselves lacked growing up, are not appreciated and the pendulum has indeed swung from one generation to the next. Can Elaine mend her relationships with each so they feel the love and attention she thought she'd lavished on them as children?

Goldreich tugged at my heartstrings from page one and reminded me, as a parent, that no matter what we do or don't do for our children, they can wish it were different. She expertly creates characters with lives, hopes and dreams that are heart achingly accurate. Neil and Elaine were both only children of immigrant parents who had no privacy growing up with their loving, but tired, fearful, mothers and fathers who only remembered the sad times and who raised their children devoutly Jewish. The pendulum does indeed swing each generation and the Gordons raise four children with only tenuous ties to their synagogue and with as much space and privacy for each child as possible. The children all swear that all they ever wanted was the approval of their parents, which they say was sadly lacking. They felt that all of their lives, their parents grudgingly accepted the choices they made, but never lovingly approved or even disapproved. They all felt that their parents lived only for each other and their careers, to the exclusion of being truly invested in their children's lives.

The oldest children are twin daughters who did everything the same until their junior years of college when Sarah (then Sandy) and Lisa went their separate ways. Sarah went to Jerusalem where she found a deeper meaning for her Jewishness, and returned after graduation to become part of an orthodox community, living much like her grandparents had in the old country. She is artistic like her mother, but wears herself out being the hub of her children's lives.

Lisa's experience in Rome that same year scarred her for life, but she never shared her secret with anyone but her twin. She threw herself into following in her doctor dad's footsteps, becoming a renowned radiologist instead of psychiatrist like Neil, so that she wouldn't have to live a life constantly being interrupted at crucial family moments by patients' needs. Too bad she has no husband or children with lives to be interrupted. She's had a string of relationships and holds her current love, David, at arm's length. Now, in order to get a piece of family, she is attempting to adopt a little girl from her father's homeland of Russia. Oddly enough, she's the only Gordon child living anywhere near the family home.

The middle child, Peter, felt that he lived on the fringes of his family growing up, so he became the ultimate outsider by moving to the west coast for college. When he met a girl who completed him the way his parents did for each other, he grabbed at it quickly, marrying at 21 and then jumping onto the career merry-go-round that keeps him and his young family exhausted. He's lost the passion he had with his wife, so his work has become his world.

The youngest child, Denis, revealed his homosexuality during college and his parents never even flinched in trying to accept him without reservations. It is that unflinching behavior that the children all sense as a false front. They feel like their parents never shared their genuine emotions or wanted to influence them in any way. Now Denis, a lawyer with a civic conscience, lives with his partner, a Jamaican born photographer in New Mexico. The pendulum always swings from one generation to the next.

Having read this touching novel, I wonder what regrets our son has about what we did or didn't do as parents. I'm sure I'll find out. I know already that our own family has experienced the pendulum swing regarding where we choose to live. My family moved from big city Seattle to a tiny rural town when I was a tot. I moved back to Seattle when I got married 32 years ago. My husband moved from enormous Los Angeles to Seattle and now our son swears he'll be an Angelino for life, leaving Seattle's rain for LA's year-round warmth. Funny what creatures of change we are.

OPEN DOORS really touched me as a wife and mother, and I had to keep a box of tissues at hand as I read these beautifully poignant tales. Goldreich truly captures the family dynamic and I couldn't put this story down. I felt like I lived with the Gordons for their year and a half, with all its attendant laughs and cries. The closure is so nicely open-ended that I wish I could pick up a phone and give Elaine a call to ask how she's doing. Readers will come away with a genuine sense of family and how much those family members mean to us.

Susan Barton