A
Genre: Literary Fiction
Meet the Newmans is a novel set in 1964 that follows a real-life family playing a TV family. It’s about our authentic selves versus our public selves within the framework of the rise of second wave feminism. It also deals with queer identity.
The Newmans, father Del, mother Dinah, and sons Guy and Shep, are a real life family who also play a sanitized version of themselves on TV. They are the perfect White, middle class, nuclear family with a father who provides and leads, a mother who is the ideal housekeeper and cook, and two boys who are an all American athlete and a popular musician. Think Leave it to Beaver or The Donna Reed Show.
The problem is none of this is real. Del has badly mismanaged his family’s finances, and they don’t know. Dinah can’t cook to save her life and pays a housekeeper to clean her home. She and Del are living separate lives under the same roof, sleeping in separate rooms. Guy is gay. He lets the studio set him up on dates for the tabloids, but the reality is that his “roommate,” Kelly, is his partner. Shep is a teen music idol who experiments with drugs and wants to play edgier music. At the start of the book he’s also gotten a woman pregnant.
The Newmans are facing two crises. The first is that their wholesome image isn’t as popular in 1964 as it was when they started twelve years prior. Viewers see them as square and they aren’t pulling the ratings they once did. The second crisis occurs when Del gets into a car accident and is in a coma.
It looks like the series is about to be canceled, and Dinah, Guy and Shep are left to write and act the final episodes without their patriarch. Without Del running the show, they also have an opportunity to change the finale and make it something more authentic to themselves.
All of the characters in this book (even Del) feel stuck in the roles that TV, and to a larger extent, society have written for them. Dinah is not a “hausfrau” (her term) and worries that she’s not taken seriously as a person due to the fact that TV’s Dinah Newman exists solely to cook, vacuum and comfort the male members of her family. A journalist named Juliet Dunne gives Dinah a copy of The Feminine Mystique and it clicks for her. She begins to worry that not only is she not taken seriously, but that her portrayal of Dinah as the ideal homemaker is damaging to women in general. She feels stifled by her life and the show.
Guy and Shep are trying to live up to their father’s and their viewer’s ideals. Guy has to hide his sexuality, and it creates a complex scenario where he’s terrified of what being outed would do to his family and the show. At the same time he’s trying to keep the show alive by stepping into his dad’s shoes and being the perfect example of an “all American dude.” Shep has fans are a little out of control (think Beatlemania), but he wants to be seen as a person and not a sex symbol.
There’s a really great scene in the book where Shep thinks he’s connecting with a woman over their common love of certain writers, only to wake up the next morning in a bedroom wallpapered with his photos.
Because the patriarchal lynchpin of their family dynamic is removed and because the show is potentially going to be cancelled, Dinah, Guy and Shep are all propelled into action and into flux. This means that they can do a lot of exploring and growing in a relatively short narrative period without it feeling rushed. In some ways, all of these characters have been ruminating on their identities for a long time, but the accident forces them to act on those feelings in a way that feels very authentic.
Even as our three main characters re-evaluate their lives and identities, they also look at what their identity as a family means. Each of their personal journeys could fracture the family dynamic or they could rebuild around it.
The story deeply explores who we are versus who we allow others to believe we are, and is generally just a really enjoyable piece of historical fiction. The Newmans’ internal upheaval is set in a period where feminism, gay rights, and civil rights are all being explored on a national stage. There are historical tidbits woven into the narrative that remind the reader how much happened during this time in history. For example, Juliet is working on an article on The Boston Strangler purely as a background detail to the rest of the plot.
What really made me enjoy Meet the Newmans was how rich it was: rich in historical detail, rich in personal growth, rich in introspection without being naval gaze-y. I think it would be an excellent pick for a book club due to how much there is to discuss about its themes, setting and characters. I would also recommend it to fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid and Lessons in Chemistry.
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The book sounds extremely interesting—so onto Mount TBR it goes. It also seems to have clearly been inspired, at least in part, by “The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriett” in which real-life spouses, Ozzie & Harriett Nelson, along with their two sons (including teen heartthrob, singer Ricky Nelson), played highly-fictionalized versions of themselves. Sort of a precursor to reality TV.