This insightful, darkly humorous novella starts in an unexpected place for a coming-of-age story: with a murder. But as the story unfolds, the crime itself recedes into the background as we learn how the events–and people–surrounding the murder come to affect both the protagonist, 13-year-old Zinnia Zompa, and her mother. The result is a haunting examination of how others’ choices and behaviors can affect us, perhaps indelibly.
As the novella opens, it’s 1985, and for suburban teens like Zinnia, it’s the heyday of MTV, Trapper Keepers, and Sweet Valley High books. (Josefowicz captures the pop culture of the time, and the suburban setting, with humor and telling details.) But from the first pages, things take a dark turn, when a Mr. Marfeo is shot to death not far from where Zinnia lives with her mother, Pauline; her father, Stanley; and her younger sister, Zenobia.
Marfeo had been Stanley’s accountant, but Pauline suspects that an honest living can’t explain why he and his wife had been doing so well financially. Before his death, perhaps prophetically, she surmised that “all that rich living” would “come back to bite them in the end.”
In time, a prime suspect emerges in Marfeo’s murder: James Thomson, a.k.a. JT, who has a long rap sheet and a nasty temper. “A man like a lit match,” as Zinnia describes him. Yet for Zinnia and her mother especially, the connection between Marfeo and JT hits a little too close to home. It turns out that the two men met through Stanley, who’d hired JT as a foreman at the plastic-bead-making factory founded by his father. The novel hints at suspicious dealings among the three men, and at Stanley becoming involved in criminal activity. (I don’t want to reveal too much here.)
In time, JT’s behavior has troubling effects on Stanley–and consequently on Pauline and Zinnia. Long before the murder, Stanley had become obsessed with JT, seeing him both as essential to the workings of the bead factory and a threat to his status as top dog. Plagued by insecurity, he ends up dumping all of these emotions on Pauline, expecting her to prop up his ego and assure him that he’s still the main man at work. This, she cannot do. Both Pauline and Zinnia know that Stanley is “kidding himself.” Zinnia further observes: “What my father had discovered with JT was a pain [Pauline] already knew too much about. Nothing’s as steady, as secure, as you think.”
Even more troubling, Stanley is ceaselessly supportive and admiring of JT, even when JT faces trial for murder. Stanley seems to care more about JT and his fate than he does about his wife and children. Beyond this, it’s as if Stanley has belatedly discovered his ideal role model: a man who seems driven to pursue whatever he wants, regardless of the damage he leaves in his wake. This drive echoes a patriarchal self-centeredness at play in the larger culture and in the Zompa home, where Stanley has long placed his needs over Pauline’s and mocked or tried to restrict any efforts she makes to pursue interests outside of keeping house and looking after him, Zinnia, and Zenobia.
As for Zinnia, she has to contend with her feelings about her father’s behavior, and about how his own needs and insecurities threaten to cancel out the needs–and dreams–of everyone else in the house.
As Stanley becomes more obsessed with JT, and more neglectful of his family, Pauline and Zinnia must face the decline of Zinnia’s beloved maternal grandfather, Papa Frank, and of the family dog. Josefowicz writes beautifully about grief, and about the bond that Zinnia and her mother share despite the difficulties they face. Here, Zinnia observes the scene from Papa Frank’s living room window, where’s sitting by him:
At the bottom of the dark hillside, lights are strung along the port like an icy diamond necklace, the sort I’d never wear but that I’d like to give, someday, to my mother. But right now I’m not doing anything with diamonds or necklaces. I’m just here with Papa Frank and the oxygen. I hold his hand. He’s lost so much weight he’s almost nothing at this point, just loose skin and his long old bones, his exposed forearm a pale slash against the blanket. A tear rolls down my face.
Don’t cry, he whispers, don’t cry.
Toward the end of the novella, Stanley descends into a “dark funk” thanks to JT’s behavior. Zinnia observes:
[T]his time when he slams all the doors, I don’t startle. As the house reverberates, something inside me goes to ground, like a rabbit shadowed suddenly by a hawk. … These days, I hardly ever leave my room.
Pauline also spirals into depression, and it appears that she’d like to escape the limited life she’s made with Stanley. Will she? The deeply moving final pages of the novella hint at the possibility of a freer, better life for her and Zinnia, and Josefowicz vividly captures the power and fragility of this hope. But, as in real life, it’s impossible to tell where such hopefulness might lead, or even how long it will last.
Would My Pick be Your Pick?
If you're interested in ________, the answer may be "Yes":￭ Coming-of-age stories
￭ Stories about family conflicts
￭ The effects of crime, especially on families
￭ Stories set in the eighties
