A bold, provocative "pioneering novel" (Los Angeles Times) about family, womanhood, and growing up
Set on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Enchantment is narrated by Hannah Lehmann, the wry survivor of a troubled childhood. Hannah's perceptions of her Orthodox German Jewish heritage—her five brothers and sisters, the complicated power of families, the madness of money, the obsessive workings of memory itself—are as disquieting in their sharpness as they are lucid in their irony.
The world, she finds, is a treacherous place where love is closely knit with pain, but even the limitations of her own point of view are not lost on Hannah. She is all too aware that her perspective is fixed in the vise of her childhood: “My mother,” she says, “is the source of my unease in the world and thus the only person who can make me feel at home in the world.”
This is a novel about what people say when they are talking to themselves; what families look like when they are not observed by others. Provocative, hawkishly observed, and devastating in its reliability, Daphne Merkin's Enchantment is a searing and unforgettable exploration of family and self.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Set on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Enchantment is narrated by Hannah Lehmann, the wry survivor of a troubled childhood. Hannah's perceptions of her Orthodox German Jewish heritage—her five brothers and sisters, the complicated power of families, the madness of money, the obsessive workings of memory itself—are as disquieting in their sharpness as they are lucid in their irony.
The world, she finds, is a treacherous place where love is closely knit with pain, but even the limitations of her own point of view are not lost on Hannah. She is all too aware that her perspective is fixed in the vise of her childhood: “My mother,” she says, “is the source of my unease in the world and thus the only person who can make me feel at home in the world.”
This is a novel about what people say when they are talking to themselves; what families look like when they are not observed by others. Provocative, hawkishly observed, and devastating in its reliability, Daphne Merkin's Enchantment is a searing and unforgettable exploration of family and self.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"Daphne Merkin's exquisitely written novel about a young woman who can't let go and who never learned to cut her losses is a supremely delicate and intelligent fiction . . . I quite admire the book." - Stanley Elkin
"I ordinarily don't finish a novel this complex in two sittings, but I was bowled over." - Frederick Exley
"These complexities . . . are what chiefly held my attention. But there is another quality--[Merkin's] boldness, lack of shame or modesty. The book fascinates by its openness, which repels at the same time. That's why I had to read to the very last page." - Mary McCarthy
"A remarkable memoir, fictional or not. What is remarkable to me is how much being a Jewish girl of a certain sort growing up in New York is like being a Presbyterian boy of a certain sort growing up in Alabama." - Walker Percy
"Daphne Merkin's Enchantment is extraordinary--piercingly painful and marvelously funny at once. She evokes childhood and the adult life that comes out of it with rare wisdom and charm." - Hilma Wolitzer
"I ordinarily don't finish a novel this complex in two sittings, but I was bowled over." - Frederick Exley
"These complexities . . . are what chiefly held my attention. But there is another quality--[Merkin's] boldness, lack of shame or modesty. The book fascinates by its openness, which repels at the same time. That's why I had to read to the very last page." - Mary McCarthy
"A remarkable memoir, fictional or not. What is remarkable to me is how much being a Jewish girl of a certain sort growing up in New York is like being a Presbyterian boy of a certain sort growing up in Alabama." - Walker Percy
"Daphne Merkin's Enchantment is extraordinary--piercingly painful and marvelously funny at once. She evokes childhood and the adult life that comes out of it with rare wisdom and charm." - Hilma Wolitzer
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