Book Review: In the Unlikely Event

In the Unlikely Eventby Judy BlumeKnopf, 2015Beloved author Judy Blume's publisher tells a bit of a fib when they describe her new book In the Unlikely Event as the author's “return” to adult fiction. Blume is of course famous for her outstanding Young Adult classics like Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, Then Again, Maybe I Won't, and Superfudge, books that have awakened millions of young readers to the sheer possibilities of reading. But Blume also had a hit with her bestselling 1998 novel Summer Sisters which, because it followed its two main characters into an adulthood in which they had sex, prompted its publisher, Delacorte Books – and likewise prompted more than a few book reviewers who should have known better – to characterize it, too, as adult fiction.It most certainly was not, nor is In the Unlikely Event. Blume writes stories about good kids, and she writes them for good kids – it's probably not anything she could change even if she sincerely tried. Her books not only feature but positively glow with the kind of narrative and especially moral simplicity that would be as out of place in, say, a novel by Donna Tartt or A.S. Byatt as would search-a-word puzzles at an international physics symposium. In the Unlikely Event is a YA novel from start to finish, but YA fiction is all the rage these days in any case (the multi-million dollar empires of Twilight and John Green aren't supported solely by allowance-money of teenage girls), and in any case, Judy Blume is one of our best living practitioners of the genre, so it's hardly a detriment to her latest book.An odds-defying series of plane crashes in the early 1950s in Elizabeth, New Jersey, is the narrative axis of that book, a bizarre series of tragedies that rattled the townspeople and filled their minds with all sorts of wild theories that would explain events. Blume takes her readers inside these events by creating the world of 1950s Elizabeth so thoroughly and so intimately that by the time disaster strikes, it strikes a very real-feeling place.The story opens with the book's main character, teenager Miri Ammerman, going last-minute holiday shopping for her mother with her best friend Natalie. They're a little bewildered by the process (“Just the word lingerie was enough to send them into fits of laughter,” we're told), and they're equally bewildered by some of the fripperies on offer at the town's department store:

The shoppers, all women, talked in hushed voices. A small white Christmas tree with silver ribbons threaded through its branches, topped by a silver angel, sat on the display table. Satin bedroom slippers and delicate bed jackets in pale colors were arranged around the tree. Who wore bed jackets? … Maybe move stars who were served breakfast in bed wore bed jackets. But there were no movie stars in Elizabeth, New Jersey. None that Miri knew of, anyway.

Meanwhile, for instance, Natalie's older brother Steve Osner, a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School, is living a fairly normal teenager's life, talking with his friends about sports and girls. “You were always ahead of the rest of us,” one friend tells him, which prompts him to reflect on a certain element of his life:

If only that were still true, Steve thought. A lot of the guys talked about how much they were getting. Their girlfriends let them touch and look. Steve had touched but no one had ever let him look. He didn't have a regular girlfriend. He liked playing the field. Maybe he just hadn't met the right girl yet. He knew girls who'd invite you to their houses to neck on the sofa in the living room, but it never went any further than that. Maybe he was doing something wrong. It might be different if they went to a coed high school. Theirs was the only city in New Jersey with sex-segregated public high schools, Jefferson for boys, Battin for girls. Even St. Mary's was coed and those kids were Catholic.

In completely assured expanding rings of detail, Blume extends her story from this nucleus of young characters to their friends, their teachers, their parents, their parents' friends, the cousins of all of the above, the friends and children of those friends, and so on. At first, this tactic seems not only bewildering but somewhat lazy, an author refusing to control her material. But the reading is infectious, and the more the profusion grows, the clearer Blume's genius becomes, the key realization that simple tragedy without community yields virtually no drama. The plane crashes that happen to the is wide web of interconnected characters warp and strain the broader community Blume has so painstakingly created.The shock and the pathos of those sudden tragedies end up playing a secondary role to the much quieter and more skillfully-executed drama of an ordinary mid-century East Coast town and its inhabitants. And the end result is classic Judy Blume: ordinary people, good kids, dealing with the things life throws at them. Adult fiction isn't often this effective; teens should cheer that their best mentor is still at the top of her game.