Homestretch

Helen Yglesias started writing fiction at age 54. With mordant intelligence, a sharp eye and grim humor in her first novel “How She Died” (1972), she depicted and dissected family relations. Her definition of family is an expansive one: It includes a committee that raised the daughter of an accused Soviet spy in that first novel, members of an esoteric English-Indian cult (“The Saviors,” 1987), a working-class family so blended that it takes chapters to unravel the connections (“Sweetsir,” 1981) and a large Jewish immigrant family torn dealing with issues of material success and social commitment (“Family Feeling,” 1976). In “The Girls,” her fifth novel, Yglesias, now 84, returns to another immigrant family, similar to the one in which she grew up the youngest of six children.

The years have thinned the ranks of the Witkovsky family. Husbands and brothers are dead, children and grandchildren far-flung, leaving only the four sisters to care for one another. As the novel opens, 80-year-old Jenny arrives in Miami Beach from her beloved New England at the behest of her sister Flora, 85, to help care for their ailing older sisters, 90-year-old Naomi, who is dying of cancer, and Eva, 95, disease-free but slowly fading.

The sisters are connected through deep (and exceedingly long) family bonds, forged more through ancient rivalries than actual fondness. As Flora and Jenny arrange for the final care of Naomi and Eva, the book delineates their affections and insecurities, as they progress through nursing homes and hospitals, birthday celebrations and hurricanes.

Jenny, a teacher, writer and critic, is the only sister who “had chosen to live in a wider world.” This world shrinks considerably the moment she enters Flora’s purple condominium and is engulfed in her sister’s wet and solid flesh. Flora has been caught before she’d finished her toilette, and her rinsed hair oozes black dye from beneath her purple towel. Jenny is plunged into the world of aging and ailing flesh that shapes the sisters’ lives. Flora and Jenny begin sparring immediately as they rehash and reinvent arguments and resentments that have hobbled them for decades: money, food, sex, abortion, Israel. Everything is grist for conflict. The family bickering is echoed by tensions throughout Miami. Riding the crowded buses, Jenny, who speaks English and Spanish, understands all of the slurs and insults between Jews, blacks and Latinos, in whatever language they are muttered.

Miami Beach may be alien territory for Jenny, but she can manage that. What she finds even more bewildering and foreign, despite her 80 years, is the terrain of old age. Moving between the flamboyant Flora with her dyed hair, garish clothes and blatant sexuality and her two ailing older sisters, Jenny is acutely aware that she has never quite fit in. Unmoored from work and family, she has to remind herself that she was “a minor actor in the New York intellectual scene, [that] she was Somebody.”

In the condominiums, old-age homes and hospitals of Miami, her intellectual triumphs, her worldly successes have little resonance. They are barely understood, as if they were the mysterious accomplishments of distant children and grandchildren.

Jenny’s perceptions are often razor-sharp, but there are moments when her age, the heat, exhaustion and tension create a scrim behind which events move at a distance, a thin layer that separates her from reality. This distance sometimes gives perspective, but can just as easily render the world incomprehensible and even more difficult to negotiate.

As Eva considers the pros and cons of moving into the same nursing home as Naomi, she remarks, “We were never really close. . . . All those old rivalries. Papa loved me best. Mama loved her best, I wanted it the other way around and so did she. She was always prettier. I was jealous of that. And she was jealous of me--God knows why.” This, remember, is a 95-year-old woman speaking of her 90-year-old sister. It is moments like these--filled with the sisters’ edgy, bickering carping--that provide the ballast of this book.

Yglesias offers no easy answers. The old age she depicts is not a serene territory of wisdom and acceptance. Riding together through the steamy Miami streets in the back of a medical van to a nursing home, the sisters, deciding to sing, argue about their choice of song. As Flora cuts off Jenny’s “Good Night Irene” with “When the Saints Go Marching In,” Naomi is quick to correct. “Isn’t it ‘Come Marching?’ ” It is, and the four women finally harmonize as they head toward Eva’s and Naomi’s final home. “The Girls” might not have the descriptive density of Yglesias’ earlier books, but by mingling resignation, hope, crankiness and love, Yglesias achieves an achingly honest portrayal of a world that is usually rendered as caricature.