Maureen Corrigan

Some twenty years ago, a cobweb descended over my right eye.

What I thought was a migraine turned out to be a semi-detached retina.

Even saying those words now makes me flinch.

After surgery, I lay still for days on my side, eye patch in place.

Back then, my husband and daughter went to our local library to find books on tape for me.

Since I'd reviewed Allegra Goodman's novel Intuition just before this scary event happened, they brought home cassettes of two of Goodman's earlier novels, Katterskill Falls and The Family Markowitz.

I was lucky, and my sight recovered, so now I think of that interlude of being marooned on the couch, listening to Goodman's novels unspool, as one of the most idyllic reading experiences of my life.

Which is why, even though I've kept up with Goodman's work, I was hesitant to read her new novel, This Is Not About Us.

Most of her books have explored intense and enclosed worlds, from the labs of cancer researchers in Intuition, to rare book zealots in The Cookbook Collector, to the island prison of a 16th-century castaway in last year's Isola.

This Is Not About Us, however, is different.

It's a throwback in form and subject to The Family Markowitz, which came out 30 years ago.

Both novels are domestic tales about three generations of a Jewish family, and both are structured as a series of linked stories in which various family members take center stage.

I worried that returning to a familiar formula might mean that Goodman was running out of energy as a writer.

Then I started reading and stopped worrying.

When I finished This Is Not About Us, I kid you not, I read it a second time, just to savor all the interconnections, all the shifts in family members' opinions of each other.

This Is Not About Us opens at the prolonged deathbed of Jean, who at 74 is the youngest of the three Rubenstein sisters.

Jean's house is packed with flowers.

The sunflowers from her daughter-in-law Melanie, the roses from the Auerbachs next door.

The flowers depressed her, especially those already wilting.

When she looked at the mums, she felt she wasn't dying fast enough.