The structure of Alice Mattison's novel "Nothing is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn" is one of its most compelling elements. Mattison chooses to alternate between two significant periods of the protagonist's life. One chronicles a week when, house-sitting for her mother, Con's fragile marriage heads toward demise and her daughter goes missing.
The second period of time is more than a decade in the future when Con has both her daughter, her ex-husband, and her mother's closest friend staying in her house. Con has forgotten most of the details of the week at her mother's but it is clear that that moment from the past and her present and are closely linked.
The novel is essentially about relationships. Con is front and center and the reader joins her as she sifts through the complicated dynamics between herself and those she is closest to. Marlene, her mother's best friend, has always been a source of puzzlement to Con. Marlene is flashy, racy, and romantic, while her mother is placid, capable, and timid. Con cannot fathom their connection and it bothers her for reasons she cannot put her finger on.
During both weeks, as Mattison focuses on the mystery behind the connection between Marlene and Con's mother, it develops an unsuspected sinister edge.
Joanna, Con's daughter, has never liked Marlene and is suspicious of the woman's intentions. When she learns that Marlene will be in Brooklyn over the weekend, she contrives to be there as well to bring to light the shadows that surround her grandmother's friend.
Joanna is an opinionated if somewhat scattered artist and her strong personality is a challenge for Con even though she has a distaste for her own mother's passive character.
During the week when Con stays with her mother's cat, the house is burglarized. Con's purse is stolen, as is a box of trinkets from her mother's bureau. The point of this petty crime as Mattison writes it is not the small losses but the profound effect of invasion. Con's mother simply forgot to lock the door, which allowed the thief to enter without a sound and stand unobtrusively in the bedroom where Con is asleep. The violation of privacy is striking but not a route Mattison pursues, much to my dismay.
In fact, I found "Forgotten in Brooklyn" to be disappointing overall. None of the women's relationships in the novel manages to come to life. There is an underlying air of carping and irritation with one another that I felt was a disservice to female friendships. Mattison brushes over the complexities and becomes more concerned with a number of fairly contrived coincidences.
A winning scene in the narrative occurs on the weekend a decade after the burglary. Jerry, Con's ex-husband, has a strange penchant for visiting historical sites and prowling through them for unspecified purposes of his own. While in Brooklyn, the site of exploration is an aspiration to track the path of an elevated subway line that had gone through the initial stages of construction before the crash of 1929.
Marcus Ogilvy wanted to connect the Brooklyn subway stops above ground so its passengers would not have to shuttle back into Manhattan in order to reach certain points in Brooklyn by subway. Jerry and Con spend an afternoon searching for vestiges of its inventor's dream. Incredibly, they find traces. Broken down supports exist amidst the buildup that one cannot see unless he or she is looking for them.
These quiet discoveries between Jerry and Con have a lovely magical quality that makes a connection to the past that Mattison's jumps between decades fail to accomplish.