Commuters by Emily Gray Tedrowe

Emily Gray Tedrowe is a superb writer gracefully weaving in minute detail while maintaining the pace of this fantastic, naturalistic novel.  Authorial voice simply vanishes providing a beautifully transparent lens through which we see the members of two families in a small, NYC commuter town at a moment of marriage and crisis. Sure the book is “quiet,” yet it’s gradual accretion of achingly real gesture and dialogue build to a very powerful, memorable story of–let’s face it–the truly sensational and always the most interesting subjects, love and money. She reminds me of a contemporary Edith Wharton stripped of even a trace of malice or satire, in the way her story illustrates an entire, complex, socaial world. She has a whole-hearted, almost earnest, affection for her characters and as readers so do we. It’s so refreshing not to be laden with irony and the thinly veiled ideology of a given writer, and just be given what’s here, given life.