When All Is Said and Done Book

Eight years and four jobs and five pregnancies and meetings and train schedules and formula and diapers and deadlines and clients and mortgage and croup and a revolving door of baby nurses and Dan stagnating in that civilian job I convinced him to take when the Air Force wanted him back for Korea of all things, they got Elvis, they didn't need Dan, a man of his age, for crying out loud, and after what they did to him in that hospital upstate . . .

It is the early 1960s and Myrmy stubs her toe in the predawn hours on her way to soothe her infant son, cursing the latest nurse for not waking up, again. Dressed to the nines, it is Myrmy who is off to an executive position writing advertising copy for shampoo. Her husband, Dan, who fought in two wars, sells ties and cooks dinner. A Jewish couple living in an exclusive suburb of New York, Myrmy powers through her life in high heels and Dan silently suffers the mysterious aftereffects of a radiation experiment conducted by the military. Together they raise a family.

Publishers Weekly

A tightly crafted, emotionally resonant debut novel set in the 1950s and '60s skims the upwardly mobile lives of an unconventional Jewish family on the far edges of the New York suburbs. When Madison Avenue advertising executive Myrmy moves her growing family out of Brooklyn, she is directed away from the Waspy Charmington, Conn., to the less restrictive Eastly-for "people like you," the realtor advises. Thus begins an ambivalent life on Pink Cloud Lane for prefeminist working mother Myrmy, her steady GI husband, Dan (whose lungs were damaged in army radiation experiments), three sons hard-won after several miscarriages, and the indispensable nanny in nurse's whites. Hectic household rhythms and run-ins with the goyishe neighbors Ed and Mary Fence and their six daughters provide some comic relief until illness disrupts married life for Myrmy and Dan, who alternately narrate the novel. Myrmy weathers promotions and pneumonia, while Dan suffers from a burned-out thyroid and suddenly dies. With evocative, freewheeling prose ("the run-on sentences that were her married life"), Hill, an ad copywriter himself, nimbly salvages one family's striving from an era of grasping and consumerism. (Apr.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.