THE FLOAT TEST, by Lynn Steger Strong
Writers are the worst, am I right? As a writer, I can say this. Whether we’re following in the grand “everything is copy” tradition of Nora Ephron or quietly “borrowing” other people’s stories, we cannot be trusted. But what happens when the writer is your beloved sister, and your whole family is kind of a disaster, with years of snubs, betrayals, and accidental and purposeful misdeeds between everyone, many of them aired in print by the writer?
And what happens when, in the midst of all that, you have to go home?
This powder keg of a dynamic is the backdrop to Lynn Steger Strong’s latest novel, “The Float Test,” which kicks off with an unexpected death. Deborah, the high-powered, demanding litigator matriarch of the Kenner family, suffers a fatal stroke while running. And so, during “the hottest summer in the history of Florida summers,” the four semi-estranged Kenner siblings — Jenn, Fred, Jude and George, all middle-aged, with middle-aged problems aplenty — converge to mourn and help their now-widowed father.
Jenn is the oldest of the siblings. She’s the “meanest and also sweetest,” and she now has six kids of her own. Fred, the writer, is next. She’s left her husband, is living in a borrowed house, and finds herself unable to write anymore amid a crisis of conscience (and confidence) after the death of a friend. Jude, the third, who has secrets of her own, assumes the role of the novel’s quasi-omniscient narrator, explaining, “A lot of what I’m saying here I found out later; the rest, as Fred would say, I’ve imagined my way into, because why not.” Finally, there’s George, the baby who brings to the table marital and employment problems, along with a Lhasa apso named Libby.
If all that spiraling interpersonal drama isn’t enough, I should mention that in the opening pages of the novel Fred finds her mother’s gun. She carries it around in her bag, as we readers, in accordance with Chekhovian principle, wait for it to come out again. This, along with the mysteries of what’s really going on with each sibling, and whether they can find a way to be a family again (also: why the heck did their mom have a gun in her closet?), adds propulsion, acting as a foil to the muggy daze of Florida heat and the suspended-in-animation feeling of grief imbued in the story.