We Are Not Ourselves: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, August 2014: Ten years in the making, Matthew Thomas s heartfelt debut launches with the gritty poetry of a Pete Hamill novel: brash Irishmen on barstools, Irish women both wise and strong, and the streets of New York splayed out like a song. What s special about this book is how Thomas takes us, slowly and somewhat unexpectedly, deep inside a family battling the gray-toned middling place of their middle-class existence. At the core is Eileen Tumulty Leary, urging her complacent husband and their impressionable son forward. Along the way, lives come and go. ( Fair enough, her mother said, and in a little while she was dead.) There are some gorgeous scenes, some taut lines (I liked the air-conditioning unit s indefatigable wind ), and some heartbreakers (a mother tells her son, at the funeral home, That s probably enough ). It s thrilling to see an emerging writer test and flex his voice. Eileen and her husband are coconspirators in a mission of normalcy ; in truth, there s occasionally too much normalcy in these 600 pages. Then again, it s oddly addictive to watch this family unfold, age, and devolve. Intimate, honest, and true, it s the story of a doomed father and a flawed son and the indefatigable and loving woman who keeps them all together, even as they re falling apart. --Neal Thompson