Lives of semi-quiet desperation in the New Jersey suburbs
The Cantor's Daughter: Stories
by Scott Nadelson. Hawthorne Books, Portland, Oregon, 2007, 257 pages, $15.95 paper
Sidebar: Award winner
It has been nearly 50 years since a very young Philip Roth took his measure of the New Jersey suburbs in the bitingly satirical stories of Goodbye, Columbus (1959). Many American Jews were offended that so much dirty linen was put out to flap on public lines, but Roth's first collection of short stories was so brilliantly rendered and so dead on about the ways cultural assimilation had changed the landscape of American-Jewish life that it set a very high literary bar.
So, let me begin with the "bad news": 
The eight stories in The Cantor's Daughter are neither as incandescent nor are they as penetrating as Roth's steamy tale about Neil Klugman and Brenda Patimkin or about how and why a hasidic yeshiva student ended up wearing a Brooks Brothers suit. But — and here is the "good news" — Scott Nadelson's stories are carefully constructed, one sentence upon another, as they move inevitably toward quietly unsurprising endings. In this, his third book, Nadelson proves himself a tireless chronicler of missed opportunities. His characters tend to live inside their skins, where subtle changes in the atmosphere register in small units that build up as the plot carries them along.
The title story, for example, is about a cantor who moves to Chatwin, a NJ suburb, eight years after his wife was killed in an auto accident. His daughter, Noa Nechamia, was eight at the time. They had immigrated to Israel from Tangiers, and then to New Jersey from Netanya. The cantor shleps his tragic memories, his increasingly rebellious daughter, and a first-rate collection of opera records to his new post, where he quickly learns the Ashkenazi melodies that the congregants of Temple Emek Sholom were used to
By contrast, his daughter was another drama altogether:
"[S]he was sixteen now, a junior in high school. Her narrow face was too somber to be called pretty, with deep-set eyes and a hairline that started low on her forehead, not more than an inch above her heavy eyebrows. Her lips were full and well shaped…. At night, with the bathroom door closed, she practiced putting on lip gloss, so in the morning she could get it straight even as the bus jolted over potholes. She kept extra tissues in her purse to wipe it off before coming home."
Her lip gloss regimen was, let us say, mild sneaking (in point of fact, her father did not disapprove of makeup); full-bore rebellion would came later as Noa begins smoking cigarettes, kissing boys, and discovering how popular a young lady could become if she goes all the way.
Nadelson paces his narrative in ways that balance Noa's sexual intrigues with her largely disengaged father; it all comes to a head on prom night, when nearly everything that can go wrong does. In more conventional fiction, fireworks would result when a daughter, especially a cantor's daughter, is discovered in the act — but Nadelson's story means to explore layer upon layer of missed opportunity.
Nadelson's tales give characters a chance to make amends after years, sometimes decades, of estrangement. In "Walter's Girls," three sisters try to make sense of their father's suicide. Jamie, the youngest, "kept it to herself," while Andrea, "typically dramatic," held her head in both hands and muttered, "I should have called more often. I should have listened to him. Maybe I could have seen the signs." In "Model Rockets," a father tries desperately to find something, anything, that might keep his son from becoming a full-fledged juvenile delinquent. After all, they were living in the suburbs of New Jersey, not Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where Jews had to be tough, sometimes even ruthless, just to hold their ground: "Nobody needed a knife here: his son brought one to school anyway."
In "Rehearsal," two brothers — one with a respectable history, the other sporting a long string of personal failures — meet at a wedding, where the air crackles with potential outbursts barely kept at bay. And in "Half a Day in Halifax," arguably the most fully realized story in the collection, two lonely adults on a cruise nearly find the romance that shipboards are famous for — as once again, Nadelson proves himself a master at orchestrating the opportunity that misfires. His characters, whether touring Nova Scotia or on vacation in Scotland ("Return"), bring the arts and crafts of miscommunication with them.
How much of this poignancy is caused by the NJ suburbs, how much by Jewishness, is hard to say. Most of his characters acknowledge the major Jewish holidays (some, even "minor" ones), but even his cantor doesn't spend much time, on the page at least, in the synagogue. Instead, rich inner lives filled with all manner of fantasy are revealed on Nadelson's pages, and mostly in NJ settings. Here, for example, is the cantor's daughter, who still blames her father for the car accident that killed her mother and who, on some days, feels the "impulse to hurt him….":
"Some things she only imagined doing — converting to Christianity, to Buddhism, to Islam, changing her name on her eighteenth birthday to Noelle Nicholas. Other things she did more than imagine. She smoked cigarettes and drank sweet wine. She shoplifted items she didn't need or even want — silk underwear, cucumber soap, a rhinestone-studded change purse. She let boys kiss her, touch her, drive her off to secluded parking lots and quiet residential streets."
Nadelson's largest asset is his ability to write crystal-clear, eminently readable sentences. He has staked an imaginative claim on the suburbs of the Garden State and the quietly sad Jews who live there. He plays this poignant tune with grace and large reservoirs of heart.
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