Patty Friedmann's new book \Secondhand Smoke"" rolls in like a malevolent fog, gets into the lungs and raises the phlegm from the deep recesses of the alveoli. It is a work to cough back up, trying to return some of the detritus that it produces. The smoke of the title flows deeply in the veins of every character and leaves a thick black film on every surface it touches. The book itself is not composed of the same dank moisture of the fog, but its people contain more toxic wisps of bad air than can easily be handled.
Somewhere in the working class swamp that has been taken over by the city of New Orleans, Jerusha Bailey's life is composed of harassing her decadent neighbors and complaining about everyone who is not white. After her husband passes away from an extended and ignoble struggle with a brain tumor, her two grown children, Zib and Wilson, return home briefly. Zib gets through her days as a dejected and sometimes dissatisfied assistant manager at a Winn-Dixie on the Florida panhandle. Wilson teaches Organic Evolution in Chicago and struggles with his conversion to Judaism in the face of his mother's harping criticism. Trying to reconcile his mother's brusque nature to his own intellectual pursuits, Wilson ""sounds clinical when using four-lettered words.""
The family is united briefly to scatter the father and husband's ashes at Arlington Cemetery. With a skewed understanding of the momentous occasion, Zib and Wilson feel isolated while Jerusha is improperly despondent. With the remains of the man dispersed, the three go back to their polarized lives. Zib returns to the sexual advances of her manager and an empty apartment. Wilson finds his estranged wife waiting for him with her spoiled children and the ghosts of a former marriage. Jerusha is the worst of anyone. Her only companions are a dog named Mealworn and Dustin Puglia, the street-wise 10-year-old son of her neighbor. Apart from each other, these three are no less miserable, just miserable in a different setting.
""Secondhand Smoke"" shifts perspective between the three central characters, moving the story forward with the specific tone and complaints of each. This method of storytelling triangulates the book into three corners; Jerusha is progressively cynical, Wilson thinks himself into dark alleys and Zib complains with tears. These three viewpoints remain fixed and sometimes static, keeping up easy archetypes throughout the book while providing them with impressive depth. Though the development makes each character distinct and believable, the edges of their personalities cut into the story.
Jerusha frequently goes into a rant about her neighbor's color and grinds the matter into racial dust much too quickly. Her children suffer faults that contrast each other.
""I'm as scientific and godless as Wilson. I just don't see any reason to make a living out of it,"" Zib whines.
Zib's particular brand of negativism makes her chapters seem bitter upon completion because they use a dozen pages to take cheap shots at bag boys and rich kids who work at her store. Wilson's situation consists of academically fabricated complaints that have him winding into carefully constructed condemnations of his status. All three function better on their own and end up overlapping their invectives when they meet.
Patty Friedmann tackles alienation extensively and is far better at keeping her characters apart from everybody instead of near anybody. She devotes a staggering amount of time to people performing their bathroom functions and hanging up phones without saying goodbye. Most people are spoken of as if they should be familiar but are only acquaintances at best. Everybody sees each other through the hazy smoke of the title that clouds some passages while purging others of any trace of sentimentality or tenderness.
""Secondhand Smoke"" is published by Counterpoint.
