LISA, LISA by Beatrice Shalit, translated...

LISA, LISA by Beatrice Shalit, translated from the French by David Kornacker (Available Press: $8; 233 pp., paperback original). The principal narrator of Shalit’s delightful novel is Sarah, a young matron whose calm good sense holds her eccentric family together. She sets the tone for the book when she confesses she’d like to trade in her relatives, “not forever, but for a month, maybe even two. A kind of convalescence with normal people, the ones you see every day in the supermarket.” A gathering of this abnormal clan for the wedding of a distant cousin forces the resolution of the interlocking marital problems that have afflicted two generations. Shalit’s vivid characters charm the reader, as they charm every outsider who enters their family circle.