Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation

In Yahm’s bawdy and irreverent debut, a Jewish family copes with a congenital illness. Louise, an admittedly mediocre cellist, jokes bitterly that her late Orthodox mother, a Freudian psychoanalyst, messed up her psyche through religion and psychology. She marries Leon, a gentle and somewhat hapless therapist-in-training, in 1974. Five years later, they move from the Upper West Side to a farmhouse in Upstate New York with their baby daughter, Lydia. By the fourth grade, Lydia exhibits symptoms of OCD, such as excessive hand-washing, and they do their best to get her help. Then Louise starts experiencing neurological symptoms like her mother had. Louise believed her mother had died from brain cancer but then learns that she might have had a genetic disorder found among Ashkenazi Jews. In what she intends as a radical act of love, Louise deserts Leon and Lydia for a kibbutz in Israel, hoping to spare them the hell of seeing her waste away as her mother did. In Israel, she undergoes an experimental treatment. The story is heartbreaking, but it teems with life thanks to the family’s irrepressible witty banter. This cathartic novel will move readers. Agent: Alice Tasman, Jean V. Naggar Literary. (May)