Catherine Newman’s American pastoral

Rocky, Nick, Willa and Jamie live comfortable, happy, middle-class lives on the US east coast. Rocky – her real name is Rachel, but even her 92-year-old dad doesn’t call her that – is a magazine writer, who spends her days testing recipes and offering a-little-bit-serious, a-little-bit-funny advice in a medium that she knows is fast disappearing. Nick, her husband, is a physical therapist: they’re in their 50s, but it’s clear they still have hot sex and one of the joys of this novel is that you don’t begrudge them for a minute. Their kids are grown: Willa is a gender-queer scientist and Jamie, the straight arrow of the family, has gone to work for a consultancy firm. “I like money,” he says at one point, unapologetically – and once again, thanks to Catherine Newman’s empathy and skill, you don’t resent him for it.

But then, one day, some time in the approximate present, not far from their cosy home, a car crosses the train tracks and its driver is killed. The driver’s name is, or was, Miles Zapf, and he was a high-school classmate of Jamie’s. Was it suicide? Was it murder brought about by the train company’s negligence? Rocky, the novel’s narrator, becomes obsessed with Miles’s death, stalking his bereaved mother on Facebook and ruminating constantly about her loss. At the same time, a peculiar rash begins to appear on Rocky’s body. It seems an echo of Miles’s death, the somaticisation of distress. Or it’s menopause. Or something else entirely. Meanwhile, life goes on: there are articles to be written, meals to be cooked, beloveds to be loved, and that’s before we even get to the cats (Chicken and Angie, in case you wanted to know).

This slender novel – a followup to Newman’s previous novel, Sandwich – is hugely enjoyable, absolutely real and thoughtful without ever being over-determined. We All Want Impossible Things, Newman’s adult debut novel (she has also written a memoir and books for children), was that rare thing: a critical and commercial success. If you have read Sandwich, you’ll already know the characters in this book, and be aware of some of their challenges and losses; but if you haven’t, don’t be put off: Wreck works absolutely as a standalone book.

We never meet Miles Zapf, or really know much about his life – this could be seen as a weakness, but Newman’s purpose is surely to show us how tragedy, however tangential, is tragedy, and that even the apparently loosest of bonds connects us to each other. Rocky lingers at the edge of the local cemetery after Miles’s funeral – its location posted on social media, the modern enabler of emotional voyeurism – as a helpless non-participant. “I had reasons for being there, sure, but none of them were good. Proximity to the thing I’m most afraid of. A strong sense that I know how it might feel to lose a child. Marinating in someone else’s grief like it could season me to the bone.” She passes harsh judgment on herself: the reader may be more gentle.

Yet we do discover a connection to Miles, not only to his life but to his death. It would be unfair to give it away. That connection demonstrates how no family – no matter how comfortably middle-class, how seemingly isolated from the terrors of 21st-century America (there’s no Trump in this novel, no ICE, the medical insurance companies Newman mentions are a pain in the ass but not a source of existential financial dread) –escapes responsibility for the world we seem to be building, where the price of a life is factored into tables of statistics. The novel holds up a mirror to the question I reckon many of us ask ourselves, much of the time: how bad do we need to feel? There’s no answer. But the question won’t disappear.

Newman takes her epigraph – or one of them – from Nora Ephron: “Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know – it’s everywhere. You could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again, you could be.” Readers of her earlier novels will know that Newman has an Ephron-esque gift for blending the sharp and the sad, an ability to let us love her creations while also allowing us to witness them at their most exasperating.

Wreck by Catherine Newman is published by Doubleday (£16.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £14.44. Delivery charges may apply

Photograph by Fred Langer/Getty Images