Unpacking Family Secrets

Sandwich, a lyrically written, thoughtful, and often humorous novel, carries the reader into the lives of an extended family on their annual summer vacation at a Cape Cod beach town.

While the family—children, parents, and grandparents—appear at first glance to be unremarkable, by the end of the week they will have revealed the unspoken depths of their lives.

From the novel’s first paragraph, Catherine Newman demonstrates her adeptness at mixing humor with trepidation in a harbinger of the story to come: “Beneath the waves: shivers of great white sharks, stuffed to the gills—or so one imagines—with surfers.”

The story begins on the road to Cape Cod. Rachel, known as Rocky, and her husband Nick have just picked up their two children, Jamie and Willa, and Jamie’s longtime girlfriend, Maya, at the railway station. “In the passenger seat of one slightly rusting silver Subaru station wagon: a woman in her fifties. She is halfway in age between her young adult children and her elderly parents.” This, I believe, is where the novel’s title comes from. Rocky is sandwiched between her adult children, dealing with their issues as they search for a contented life, and her parents, who have settled into a countdown of their final years. “She is long married to a beautiful man, who understands between twenty and sixty-five percent of everything she says. Her body is a wonderland. Or maybe her body is a satchel full of scars and secrets and menopause.”

The first day of vacation gets off to a—pardon the pun—rocky start as husband and wife do battle with a sluggish commode in their rental cabin. “He’s bent over the toilet with the plunger again, working it like he is churning some kind of debased butter.” Rocky leaps onto the edge of the tub as sewage spills onto the floor; in short order, she falls, hitting both her head on the edge of the sink and Nick with a loosened shower curtain rod.

Things do go uphill from there, as much of the front half of Sandwich walks us through the family settling into the rental and spending time at the beach. Newman, though, hints that this week won’t be all slapstick and superficiality, but rather a backdrop for what remains unspoken and concealed. One of the first excursions on Saturday is to the candy store: “The kids used to vibrate with excitement if you even mentioned it. It’s almost painful, the way little children just trustingly hold out their hearts for you to look at—the way they haven’t learned yet to conceal what matters to them.”

With the arrival of Rocky’s parents at midweek, it is all but given that secrets will spill and old wounds reopen, as the early week laughter and excitement transition to quiet discussions and life-changing decisions.

Apart from the brief prologue, Sandwich is largely told through Rocky’s first-person narration. This storytelling device can make the story feel more natural and authentic. But a character must be compelling enough to prevent the reader from becoming bored as if they are slogging through a novel told by a dull great-uncle. That is not an issue with Rocky’s quirky, laughable, and insightful narration. She is not perfect, but that makes the story more interesting and unpredictable thanks to her lively commentary and skewering asides. (“‘Dad and I defrosted the chest freezer’ is an actual text I once sent in response to a question about our weekend and how it was going.”)

It is a tremendous credit to Catherine Newman that she pulls this off so compellingly that by novel’s end I did not believe that the richness and depth of this novel could have been effectively relayed through any other voice or narrative technique. The serious notes and revealed secrets land ever more somberly and effectively in juxtaposition to the humor.

The story deepens as the week stretches on. Maya awakens Rocky early one morning; they walk quietly in their nightgowns as Maya discloses that she is pregnant but has not told Jamie. “Have it. Don’t have it,” Rocky tells her, making clear she will support Maya in either option.

The quiet cabin atmosphere leads to further conversations and more revelations. Few, if any, topics appear off-limits. Through a DNA test, Willa has discovered there is Ashkenazi Jewish blood in the family. She asks her grandfather about it. He tells the family that his own grandparents died in 1942 in Poland—at the Treblinka extermination camp. Upset with her father for keeping this from her, Rocky thinks, “I am so sad and angry I feel like my sweating skull is going to break open like a grief piñata.”

This is a functionally dysfunctional family, lovingly working through their emotional bumps and bruises. Sandwich is honest, and Rocky is honest. She’s imperfect, but she shows us her world as she feels it.