Book Notes: Wolf at the Table by Adam Rapp

Clarissa

June 3

I wanted to read something recent, and Wolf at the Table is that, having been published only a couple of months ago. The novel is about Myra and Alec, siblings from a large Catholic family. There are other siblings but they are accidental to the story of Myra's incapacity first to notice that her brother is a serial killer and then to do something to stop him. The universe sends her innumerable signals about what's going on but she's too weak and indifferent to take action.

To keep the plot going, Rapp uses every favorite trick of American novelists which makes the novel sound like a parody at regular intervals. There are heiresses eager to throw themselves at every passing loser, rapey Catholic priests, amazing job opportunities and marriage prospects strewn around the path of a doped-up paranoid schizophrenic, and a whole lot of baseball. Rapp writes well but excludes from much of the story the only character who is not completely pathetic. Everybody else is so weak, bumbling and immoral that the character who's a serial killer almost looks good in comparison. He, at least, has some agency and isn't just floating around aimlessly.

What I'm sure the author did not intend is the novel's depiction of the degeneration of a hard-working, religious, and Republican-voting family with many children. The siblings depart from their religious roots and become either antisocial / criminal or sad / pathetic. All they can produce among them by way of progeny is one psychotic son. Who, in turn, produces another psychotic child. The only sibling of the bunch who seems to have a normal life married a rich Jew. But that's the character we hear very little about because the novel concentrates on the death of Catholicism and its aftermath.