MARRYING THE KETCHUPS
By Jennifer Close
A large Irish American family; a large Irish American bar and restaurant owned by said family; said family reeling in the wake of the death of a grandparent; a wayward daughter returning to her birthplace after a failed career in a different city; multiple points of view in alternating chapters as various members of the Irish American family struggle with marriage- and work-related problems: What do all of the items on this list have in common?
The answer is that every one of them can be found in both “Marrying the Ketchups,” by Jennifer Close, and the last novel I reviewed for this publication (“We Are the Brennans,” by Tracey Lange, which came out last summer). To be clear, the books were published in such quick succession that their similarities are no doubt coincidence. Still, the number of intersections between them gives me pause, and makes me wonder if I am duty-bound to attribute these coincidences to a lack of originality on the part of the authors.
I’ve decided not to do that.
For one thing, I believe that literary zeitgeists happen for a reason. Right now, after two long pandemic years, books about restaurants and (indoor!) family gatherings feel downright restorative.
For another, I liked them both, especially Close’s. “Marrying the Ketchups” feels like what would happen if you took all of these ingredients — familiar not just from Lange’s book but from recent novels like Claire Lombardo’s “The Most Fun We Ever Had” and less recent ones like Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections” — and raised the flame beneath them just a bit, acknowledging not only the characters’ tribulations but the devastating changes unfolding in the background of their lives. Close’s choice to set her novel primarily in 2017, just after the election of Donald Trump, has the effect of broadening and deepening the philosophical questions her novel takes on. “Why stay in an unhappy marriage?” becomes “Why stay in an unhappy marriage when the world is ending?” “Why stay in a line of work you don’t love?” becomes — you get the idea.
In Close’s short prologue, the reader will find the line that sets the tone for the novel: “The mood was askew.” Perhaps, thinks Bud Sullivan — the patriarch of the family, the founder of the eponymous restaurant — this is because he is “overexcited for the first game of the World Series,” which his beloved Cubs will go on to win; or “maybe he’d had one too many beers,” or perhaps it’s “the dread of the approaching Chicago winter.” But we know it’s none of these, and so does Bud, because the paragraph concludes with the truth: “Or maybe it was the election, that awful man all over the news, snarling and stirring up the worst parts of everyone. Bud felt something bad coming.”
Bud Sullivan, it turns out, won’t live to see this bad something (or someone) arrive; he dies right after seeing his Cubs win Game 2 of the World Series, and in doing leaves a hole that the rest of his family struggles for the rest of the novel to fill in. The novel’s three major story lines all revolve around Bud’s grandchildren being pulled back into the thrall of Sullivan’s, for better or worse. But what at first seems to indicate regression in their ranks eventually leads to transformation, even maturity. I began to imagine a slingshot in the author’s hand: She pulls her characters backward in order to launch them forward into the new lives that await them, if only they can get over their emotional hangups.
The first Sullivan grandchild we meet, after the prologue, is Gretchen, a talented musician who formed a kitschy ’90s cover band in college, meaning for it to be a way station on her path to becoming a true artist. She writes her own songs, but rarely performs them, and the band is bringing in enough money through wedding gigs that it’s hard to quit. At 33, she finds herself unable to escape from what she describes as a sort of permanent adolescence brought on by work and her immature boyfriend-slash-bandmate.
Next comes Teddy, Gretchen’s cousin and the golden child of the family, who is drawn away from a front-of-house role at a trendy restaurant in Chicago’s West Loop to take over at Sullivan’s in the wake of his grandfather’s death. This is an act he expects his family to praise and admire. But when they don’t, Teddy begins to question his motives for shouldering a responsibility nobody actually asked him to take on. Complicating matters is his recent ex, Walter — who dumped Teddy unceremoniously and then got engaged, and who keeps coming by Sullivan’s when he knows Teddy will be there.
The third and final protagonist of the book is Gretchen’s sister, Jane, who has so far followed a fairly conventional life path. She’s married her college boyfriend, had two kids with him, and moved from Oak Park — the diverse and progressive neighborhood where she grew up — to Lake Forest, described by Close as a rich and homogeneous small city north of Chicago, a place where Jane’s neighbors play gender-segregated bunco and assume that everyone else voted for Trump, too.
But Jane didn’t vote for Trump — in fact, she’s so appalled by him that she joins a “huddle” dedicated to progressive causes back in Oak Park. “When Jane first heard the word,” Close writes, “she imagined a group of women, heads together, making quiet plans to save the world. This, she learned, was fairly accurate.”
The ideological clash between Jane and her neighbors causes her to advocate for a move back to Oak Park, but her husband, Mike, is opposed. In fact, Mike is opposed to a lot of Jane’s ideas lately — and seems distracted by something Jane fears goes beyond politics.
This dance between the personal and the political, and the way the latter impacts the former, is the most interesting thematic element of “Marrying the Ketchups.” Things around them have fallen apart; the Sullivans are trying to hold the center, but increasingly, they’re finding that they can’t. The center, in this case, is the restaurant itself — Sullivan’s — the fate of which hangs perennially in the balance, and serves as a sort of metonymous representation of the late Bud Sullivan himself. Nobody wants to let go of it — because what would they do next? One other thing worth noting about “Marrying the Ketchups” is the trick Close has of taking what might otherwise be an ordinary exchange between ordinary family members and somehow making it riveting. Half of this talent stems from her merry sense of humor — I smiled throughout at various funny observations that also rang true — and the other half stems from the knack she has of inventing story lines that have the feel of extremely good gossip told across a hightop table over a beer with an old friend. Always, I wanted to stay for another, just to hear more.
Something I’ve been thinking about lately, as both a writer and a teacher of writing, is how difficult it is to make everyday events feel fascinating in fiction. “Marrying the Ketchups” is a good example of a book that performs this magic trick. Recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that propulsiveness is a quality that’s hard to explain and harder still to teach — but if Jennifer Close ever felt like running a course on it, I’d sign up.
Liz Moore’s most recent novel is “Long Bright River.”
MARRYING THE KETCHUPS
By Jennifer Close
320 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.
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