Infidelity, Dysfunction, Secrets — This Family Novel Delivers

SAME AS IT EVER WAS, by Claire Lombardo

For a certain Gen X elder, Talking Heads were the definitive ’80s band, sparking dorm-room debates over David Byrne’s nerdy mystique, the artistic merits of “Remain in Light” versus “More Songs About Buildings and Food” and whether or not the group sold out with “Little Creatures.”

Julia Ames, the protagonist of Claire Lombardo’s poignant, punctilious “Same as It Ever Was” — the novel owes its title to a Heads lyric — belongs to this demographic, evoking the stasis that clings to Gen X, the cohort trained to sit quietly as boomers and millennials scrapped over the bounty of postwar privilege. She blasts the band as she drives her 3-year-old son, Ben, around Chicago one fateful day in the early 2000s. They end up in a botanic garden, where a chance encounter ensnares her, trailing her family into the future and amplifying the consequences of choices she’d made on the sly. Lombardo shifts across timelines, weaving Julia’s volatile past with her seemingly settled present.

Approaching 60, Julia is ensconced in affluent suburbia, content with her beautiful house and the large automobile, a hostess serving wine and canapés with aplomb. Her husband, Mark, is intelligent and kind. Ben, now 24, lives nearby; her 17-year-old daughter, Alma, a “narcissistic lioness,” frets about college acceptances and a capricious girlfriend. Theirs is the good life, except that it’s not: “They are a family whose clock is always slightly askew, affections misplaced and offenses outsized.”

Julia is still tormented by her blue-collar adolescence and an illicit affair. While shopping for a party, she spies Helen Russo, a retired lawyer who was volunteering at that botanic garden two decades earlier. The women became confidantes; Helen had eventually guessed that marriage and motherhood weren’t making much sense to Julia. She’d swept the younger woman into her well-heeled brood, consisting of a husband and five sons, all dependent on her as breadwinner and dispenser of sage advice. Their sprawling residence was “one of those houses that seemed to have been engineered to entertain a revolving door of people, rosters of children and friends of children and colleagues and craftsmen.” Julia would sit at the kitchen island, “feeling suspicious of the ease and also a bit like the homely cousin from a BBC dramedy, swinging her legs in figure eights around the rungs of a bar stool.”

Helen dominates flashback upon flashback, a hybrid of Dorothy Parker and Martha Stewart, and Julia falls hard. At the same time, her son Nathaniel was bunking in his parents’ carriage house, on the road to nowhere yet lean and attractive — a bad-boy counterpoint to dull, reliable Mark. Nathaniel had unlocked Julia’s sensuality.