Plot Introduction
The novel chronicles the lives of a group of Jews - or rather, a Jewish family - in the U.S.A., in particular New York City, over a period of roughly seven months during 1991 and 1992. There is little action. Rather, the novel describes in greater detail the feelings of the protagonist and what goes on in her immediate surroundings. Most of the characters in the novel are Jewish, and the reader gets a vivid picture of the lives of assimilated Jews in the U.S.A. It is told by a third person narrator who is very close to Esther Zepler's thoughts. There are frequent flashbacks to both the distant and the not-so-distant past and numerous references to the Holocaust.
Read more about this topic: Just Like That (novel)
Famous quotes containing the words plot and/or introduction:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“For better or worse, stepparenting is self-conscious parenting. You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.”
—Anonymous Parent. Making It as a Stepparent, by Claire Berman, introduction (1980, repr. 1986)