What kind of a woman would marry a conjoined twin? Nadine, the main character of Judith Rossner’s Attachments would and she’ll one up your expectations too by convincing her best friend Dianne to marry the other conjoined twin. The refrain of “it’s complicated” when asked about a person’s love life is taken to a whole other level here. The author’s intentions are complicated too, so much so that it is not entirely clear what she strives to accomplish in writing this story.
Nadine is a naive young woman whose parents are connected to each other through the institution of marriage and yet they are emotionally distant and spend little time together. They live in a big house in California by standards that would be considered luxurious by today’s standards though the family is described as middle class in the context of this novel from the early 1980s. Nadine travels to New York to attend college and be near her friend Dianne. From her experiences there, especially regarding sex, she learns that men don’t really care about women’s feelings. It is a massive over-generalization and her conclusion is largely her own fault due to her promiscuity and the types of men she chooses to be with. Never mind the fact that she doesn’t care about men’s feelings either. This attitude carries over into her relationship with the conjoined twins and results in her being unable to cope with her marriage, but that all comes later.
When she learns about a pair of conjoined twins, Amos and Eddie, who live nearby, Nadine stalks them and seduces them. She is out for a unique sexual experience and that is what she gets. When Dianne comes out to visit her in California, Nadine proposes, without too much thought, that the four of them get married. Nadine takes Amos and Dianne takes Eddie. They all agree and end up living on a remote plot of land in New Hampshire.
By this point we learn that Nadine is the central character of the novel. She is also self-centered and barely aware of the other people in this unusual family arrangement. She becomes the mother hen of the house, especially after Dianne has a daughter with Eddie who they name Carly. Dianne leaves her with Nadine to raise her as a surrogate mother since Dianne gets employed at an enviable job in a law firm. Here we get a contrast between the two sides of the modern woman: the family woman who dedicates her life to raising children and the career woman who leaves her child behind to climb the ladder of her profession. The twins, on the other hand, have almost no personalities. They work as auto mechanics and handymen, but barely ever speak and do little more than go swimming. It is hard to tell what Rossner’s intentions are here. Are the twins really as bland as the novel makes them out to be? Or maybe Nadine is just so self-absorbed that she cannot see them for who they really are. Or maybe they are just underdeveloped as literary characters. In any case, if the author’s intentions were more clearly defined it would make it easier to situate the twins in the narrative.
Nadine also gets pregnant twice by Amos and then she has three kids to raise, mostly on her own. Her son, daughter, and surrogate daughter are also underdeveloped as characters. Throughout most of the early phase of the marriage, the story is all about how the four of them manage their lives as two couple bound together via the conjoined twins. The turning point comes when a film maker shows up in town with a band of hippy assistants and they take interest in the family of four parents and three children. A documentary film about them is proposed and as they are filmed telling their stories on camera, something changes. Nadine, for the first time in the novel, begins to think about her life and evaluate her situation. It is the first time she shows any sense of self-awareness since previously she acted solely on impulse and intuition. Her life up until then was all about seizing the moment and avoiding any calculations about future consequences. Again, it is hard to tell what the author’s intentions are here. Nadine could be deliberately portrayed as being shallow and egocentric or it could be that Rossner just failed to develop her character to completion. It might even be a little of both. But when Nadine becomes more self-conscious, she doesn’t change much as a person so her development as a literary character has to be taken as a weakness in Rossner’s writing.
The film project is never completed. A major movie studio hears about it and buys it out to make a big budget movie based on the lives of Amos and Eddie. In addition, the contract that the twins sign stipulates that they undergo surgery to separate them so that the movie’s end will depend on the outcome of the operation. The surgery is successful, the family becomes rich, and a few things change. Amos and Eddie remain just as psychologically close as they have been all their lives, but they also feel the predictable sense of liberation you would expect them to feel.
One way that the families become liberated is in the ways that they detach from each other. Nadine and Amos take their children to live in a house across the street while Dianne and Eddie stay put with Carly who is traumatized by the break up since she sees less and less of Nadine. Amos also rediscovers his passion for Nadine, but being the kind of selfish woman she is, she becomes less enamored with him as his love grows. She has always treated him as an object before, and now that he is more realized as an individual human being, she loses interest in him in part because he is no longer a novelty to her.
Then a family crisis brings out the better side of Nadine. Twelve year old Carly begins smoking pot and runs away from home to tag along with a bunch of drifters and drop outs. Nadine leads the family on a search and rescue mission to find Carly and she emerges as a more sympathetic character for a few days while she spends sleepless nights trying to locate where Dianne and Eddie’s daughter has gone. The crisis brings the two families together, but the newfound unity crumbles as soon as Carly returns. They are faced with the same old situation as Nadine continues to despise Amos while his love for her stays constant. Dianne and Nadine eventually reveal the truth of their lives to each other too as both of them admit to being miserable. Nadine wishes she were a career woman and Dianne wishes she were a housewife.
Once again, it is difficult to tell what Judith Rossner intends to say with this novel. It clearly is an examination of the individual and what responsibilities they take on in the institution of marriage and family. But in the novel’s scope, responsibility does not lead to happiness. Rossner appears to be saying that there is no way to win. We are hopelessly doomed to disappointment and misery no matter what path we choose. The reader is left with a sense of petty nihilism.
Stronger characters would have helped this book a lot. Amos and Eddie are so under-developed that you almost have to feel sorry for them. The same is true for the children. In the non-fiction world, neglect is considered child abuse; in Rossner’s fictional world, the children are so under-developed as characters that you almost want to call the fictional police to have them removed by the Child Protective Services, saving them them from Nadine’s nest. Carly is a good case in point. Her motivations for running away from home are never explored or explained and the incident ends up being more of an ego trip for Nadine to show how hard she tries to care for the children under her domain. And that comes after she decides not to intervene when she knows the twelve year old girl is doing drugs.
Nadine is the most developed character in the entire book, but in contrast to the others she is too developed for her own good. The others are more like props and less like people. But compared to other literary characters, Nadine is half formed. Putting a 2.5 dimensional character into a milieu of 1.5 dimensional characters makes the novel’s elements clash in a haphazard way. In a novel that is character driven, it doesn’t really work. Finally, it should be said that a story with conjoined twins at the center should have the twins more developed as characters too. A novel based around such an oddity should be more odd in its execution. The conjoined twins are obviously used as a metaphor and a vehicle for exploring human relationships, but as a metaphor it doesn’t hold up due to the fact that living people aren’t metaphors. This might have worked better if they had been written with more personality and depth, or at least as much personality as Nadine and Dianne. But people without character in a character driven novel just don’t hold it all together well.
Judith Rossner has great raw materials to work with here. A story about two women who marry a pair of conjoined twins is unique enough to capture anyone’s attention, but your attention might be easily deflated due to the disproportionate elements of the writing. Nadine is over-drawn in some ways and under-drawn in others, and the others characters are under-drawn in totality. Otherwise the book is an existentialist melodrama with a gimmick thrown into the middle of it. But this novel does have unrealized potential and I’d say that Rossner is a better writer than what she creates here. My speculation is that some jerks at her publishing house gave her bad advice on how to make the book more commercially palatable and took it for the sake of sending the book to print. Attachments has enough going for it to make it worth reading once. Just don’t expect too much from it.
