The Heirs by Susan Rieger
Eleanor Falkes (née Phipps) is a particular type of New York woman, brought up in privilege, married to a prominent, wealthy lawyer, mother of 5 successful sons, all Princeton graduates, she was brought up on the Upper East Side, and in a fit of rebellion moved to the Upper West Side to live in an apartment purchased by her father. “She had been bred for marriage; even her high-powered Vassar education had only served to make her more marriageable to the right sort of man, and she hadn’t known what else to do with herself.”
You might think you are entering a world of uptight society folks, the world of people “brought up without family warmth or affection,” who summer in the Hamptons, whose rictus smiles look like they might break their faces, and on the surface you are. But as we follow the fallout from the death of Eleanor’s husband, Rupert, and the “just debts” he leaves behind, we enter a world of secrets, emotional insecurity, family drama and the question of how we want to remember the dead.
Susan Rieger’s The Heirs, is a sharply written examination of a family forced to rethink everything about their patriarch. After Rupert’s death, the Falkes family is faced with a claim from a mistress, Vera Wolinski, looking for a share of the spoils for her sons. Eleanor’s sons are shaken by the claim and don’t understand why their mother is so sanguine. Rieger unwraps the stories of Rupert and Eleanor and their sons, chapter by chapter with a deft hand and a wry sense of wit and beautifully crafted observations about a particular class of people and about how children hold their parents in time, unable to see them as anything other than their parents.
There are a lot of characters in the book and to tell a story through the eyes of a different one per chapter could be unwieldy and messy, but Rieger is masterful at keeping us focused and bringing us back to Rupert and Eleanor and how they became who they were.
For the Five Famous, Fierce, Forceful, Faithful, Fabled, Fortunate, Fearless Falkes boys their parents belonged to them, they were not individuals, they were their parents. The Wolinski claim forces them to rethink. As one of the sons, Sam, declares “I don’t want either of my parents to have had a life of their own, separate from us, separate from each other. They belong entirely to us.” For a group of grown men, their fragility is unsettling and Rieger handles it beautifully, revealing their vulnerability as everything they thought about their father is open to question. Do they have to rethink their family life or not? Sam again “We’re still not willing to see you and Dad as people who exist separate from us. We all had this fantasy of our family life---until the Wolinskis.” At the same time she paints a portrait of the immensely strong and multi-dimensional Eleanor.
You would expect Eleanor to be stoic but she is something more than that. She is proper but patient, generous and gentle, and a woman of her time. She devoted herself to her marriage and her family, a wonderful mother and dedicated wife, even in widowhood, because that is what you do. “Eleanor belonged to that class of New Yorker whose bloodlines were traced in the manner of racehorses….Eleanor’s upbringing had been conducted by a martinet mother and a succession of brisk English nannies who drilled her daily on grammar, hygiene, deportment and dress.” We learn about her first love, Jim Cardozo, a jew she was forced to give up and make peace with it. Such a match would have been unacceptable. As we learn, she was more than just a wife and mother, “At what point, she wondered, would her sons stop thinking their parents existed only for them.”
In the hands of a less skilled writer, the multiple character plot line might be overwhelming, but Rieger is an elegant writer who weaves a tightly wound narrative that toggles between the past and the present, and that constantly surprises. You might start off thinking that you don’t need to read one more story about an upper-crust family torn asunder by secrets revealed after the death of the patriarch, but you’d be wrong. This is a finely crafted, exquisitely written book that provides wit and insight into that most complicated of structures – family.
BEFORE YOU READ:
Length: 252 pages
Genre: fiction
Themes: family, parents, unrequited love, siblings
Commitment: Time well spent
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