In the Unlikely Event

When I think of Judy Blume, I think of long, lazy childhood afternoons filled with Fudge and her Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, and a bit later, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret? I didn't include Judy Blume on my somewhat recent list of books that matter, but I probably should have. She, Roald Dahl, and Ann M. Martin (Babysitter's Club, anyone?) were probably the only authors I could really name when I was 10 years old. But I digress.

In the Unlikely Event is the adult version of Judy Blume at her finest. The novel is set in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in the winter of 1951-52 when three commercial airplanes crashed in town on their way in or out of Newark airport. The thought of this is so horrifying that I thought Blume created these circumstances to test her characters, but it turns out that this part is not fiction. (And Elizabeth, New Jersey, is Blume's home town and Blume was 13-going-on-14 that winter, so it's fair to wonder how much of an autobiographical element In the Unlikely Event contains.)

The story is about how individuals are affected by the crash, people whose lives might never have intersected, and some that would have intersected differently. It's about how humans cope with crisis, but more than that, it's about how messy life can be, and how so often, it takes only one quick pull of a thread for everything to unravel. In this way, it reminds me very much of When the World Was Young, Elizabeth Gaffney's fine novel of innocence lost set, perhaps not coincidentally, in the same heady, post-war years that Blume mines here.

These are Blume's people. In Miri Ammerman, I felt the presence of Margaret Simon, she of Are You There God fame. What Blume does so well is to create the story. Each chapter is told in the voice of a different character - I'd hazard to guess close to 20 in all - and for the first third of the book, it's a guessing game for the reader how these lives fit together. Blume creates dramatic plot twists in places the reader least expects, and she does all of it with an authentic voice, or in this case, voices.

Ultimately, this is a book to make the reader think. About family. About love. About choices and happiness and random luck, both good and bad. About the influence of strangers and strange events on our lives. If you read nothing else this summer, read this.