The Mothers and Marriage of Marty Fish

At slightly more than 100 pages, “Mrs. Hornstien” is what used to be called a novella, but the author’s emphasis on portraiture to the exclusion of plot suggests that the book is really more of a reverie.

Novelist Fredrica Wagman (“Playing House,” “Magic Man,” “Peachy”) has given herself permission to confine herself to limning two memorable matrons, a mother and a mother-in-law, and their impact on a bright but befuddled young woman who has yet to figure out what it means to be a woman.

The voice we hear in “Mrs. Hornstien” belongs to a woman named Marty Fish, whom we encounter first as a 17-year-old on the verge of marriage and then as a matron whose own son is about to wed. Marty is caught between an irresistible force--her own embittered mother and an immovable object, Golda Hornstien, the formidable woman whose son is her fiance. These two unwitting mentors, as we quickly discern, will shape the woman Marty herself will turn out to be.

“As far back as I can remember, and for as long as I can remember, my mother was the one great overpowering love of my life,” confesses Marty. But her encounter with her future mother-in-law is equally overwhelming. “Mrs. Hornstien was a smallish woman, but there was something enormous about her,” Marty recalls. “A great raw power shot out of her in just the way she carried herself--her enormous spirit leaped out the instant she smiled.”

The scene is fashionable Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, and the setting is a Jewish community in which the social fault lines are subtle but unmistakable. Marty’s late father was a doctor, but what kind of doctor, Mrs. Hornstien wants to know. Both families are Jewish, but is Marty German Jewish or Russian Jewish, “the silent line that divides the high-class Jews from the low-class Jews.”

As it turns out, the Hornstien family fortune was scraped together in the cigar business, but Mrs. Hornstien bears herself like a duchess and regards the marriage of her son as a weighty matter indeed. “A brilliant marriage for a woman is exactly the same as a man who makes a brilliant business deal,” she tells Marty and she does not show much enthusiasm for Marty at first: “She’s a real little nothing!” rages the old lady to her son. “I want to tell you right now that you are dealing here with a tarantula.”

Marty’s mother, a widow who is disappointed in life, cynical about men and always slightly desperate about money, gives essentially the same advice when she coaches Marty on how to please her husband in bed while skimming Marty’s household allowance to pay for the gifts she expects from a well-married daughter. “It is not romance,” says Marty’s mother. “It’s a business deal plain and simple.”

The men in “Mrs. Hornstien,” by the way, are remarked upon only infrequently and incidentally. Wagman betrays a far livelier interest and writes with far greater lyricism about the trappings of domestic life--clothing, jewelry, furniture, table settings and so on--than she manages to summon up to describe any of the menfolk who wander in and out of the narrative. “Whatever the Boss Lady says!” Mrs. Hornstien’s son and husband say, affirming each pronouncement from the lady of the house.

A match is made despite the social frictions and the misgivings of the two mothers, and then, abruptly, the action flashes forward to a moment when Marty herself is now a mother and a matron. Given how little actually happens in the book, I am reluctant to disclose the answers to the obvious questions: Did the marriage take place? Did it last? What price was Marty asked to pay for “the business deal” that her mother proposes?

Suffice it to say that “Mrs. Hornstien” is offered up as a romantic confection, and Wagman spices up the recipe with some surprising ingredients--illness and death are noted in passing now and then, losses and disappointments are mentioned obliquely--but everyone gets her just deserts in the end.