A Review: The Fallback Plan by Leigh Stein

12:14 pm - January 5, 2012: 2 notes

A Review: The Fallback Plan by Leigh Stein

When a person “of a certain age” reaches said age, various reactions have been known to ensue. Among the more traditional: depression, extramarital affairs, the purchasing of impractical items (e.g. little red sports cars), dramatic career changes, food or alcohol abuse. The non-traditional but possible: deciding to climb Mt. Everest, joining the Peace Corps, taking up improvisational comedy. Yes, the ubiquitous midlife crisis, a phrase first coined in 1965 by psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques. We know it. We fear it.

But what about the rest of us, pre-midlife—are we not entitled to our crises? Do they not deserve a name? Enter the quarter-life crisis: melancholia for the rest of us! According to the BBC (all the way back in 2002), a couple of twenty-somethings coined this analogous name after interviewing hundreds of their contemporaries and unearthing “a sense of hopelessness.” The interviewees “felt adrift and unsure of anything.” Today’s youth now have two periods of spiritual crises to anticipate. The Fallback Plan, Leigh Stein’s first novel, may also be the first (good) book to focus wholeheartedly on the aimless post-graduate experience, or crisis, that so many young Westerners now face. A young, penniless graduate named Esther, with no marriage to ruin, no money to scatter, does what more and more graduates are doing:

In June, the monsoons hit Bangladesh. Chinese police discovered slaves in a brickwork factory who couldn’t be sent home because they were too traumatized to remember anything but their own names, and Dr. Kevorkian was released from prison.

In other news, I moved in with my parents.

In the brief but affecting story that follows, Esther spends her time babysitting a darling young neighbor named May Brown, retelling the story of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe starring pandas, wishing to contract a serious but non-fatal illness, cavorting with old high school friends, and thinking. The novel is strongest when Stein lets lose Esther’s avalanche of paranoia and malaise so we receive gems like: “Maybe my life could be saved with a lobotomy. Do they perform lobotomies anymore? I wondered.”

The subtlety of Stein’s book and her characters have remained with me months after I first read The Fallback Plan. While Esther wonders about lobotomies and recalls her college theatrical productions—a time when she was, actually, psychologically ill—real grief surrounds her. Her babysitting clients, the Browns, lost a second daughter only a few months ago; a common side effect of tragedy, their marriage is suffering. But along strolls Esther, who, from the opening sequence, aligns her own minor tragedies with the greater ones of the world, with the plight of monsoon victims. Who cannot stop pitying herself or pitying herself for pitying herself. Readers may loathe Esther’s apathy but will also, probably, recognize themselves and their own faulty, selfish humanness in her rambling thoughts. Who, at their lowest, could not appreciate this tower of self-pity:

I will be alone forever, I thought to myself, and this thought was like a single pathetic rock that precipitated an avalanche of heavier, even more pathetic rocks. I am the littlest panda in the world, I thought. I am Mary Lennox if she never found the key to the secret garden and it made Colin die. I am Maria from The Sound of Music if the Nazis stormed the abbey and the Von Trapps had to spend their last days in a concentration camp with Anne Frank and Sophie from Sophie’s Choice and the guy Adrien Brody played in The Pianist.

A book in which the protagonist goes nowhere and does little and bemoans her existence—“It wasn’t until middle school that I realized life isn’t worth living” —may not seem appealing, but Stein’s writing and precise illustration of this specific malaise deserve praise and many re-reads. Let it not be ignored that long before “novelist” appeared on her biography, Stein was, and still is, a very good poet. Few writers can readily switch between these genres, but those who can excel, remaining deftly attuned to cadence and syntax and breaks.

Some dissenters in the psychiatric community have questioned whether midlife and quarter-life crises exist. Certainly, many large-scale events occur at these stages: graduation, first jobs, relationships and friendships begin and end; empty nests, career shifts, divorce. Perhaps, The Fallback Plan suggests, the events do not define us nearly as much as our reactions to them. In many ways, Esther exemplifies how one should not react—and how many do. Stein’s novel and her young heroine beg the question: in these “crises” of ours, just how selfish are we being?

* * *

SCORE: 4.0/5.0 pandas

BONUS: For readers in New York, The Fallback Plan’s launch party will be tonight at Greenlight Bookstore. Stein will discuss her novel with Sadie Stein (no relation) of The Paris Review.

DOUBLE BONUS: Melville House will also release Stein’s debut poetry collection, Dispatch from the Future, in July 2012.