Trapped in Their Own Web – Hope by Andrew Ridker

This novel by Andrew Ridker was one of my choices to read and rate for this year's Mark Twain American Voice in Literature award. Our group of readers was presented with a lengthy list of nominations. Each person must choose several books to read and rate (rather than review). Once this reading period is over, the selections that garnered positive ratings will go on to the next round. 

This book captures a unique cultural segment of American society – the contemporary secular Jewish family...not about the Orthodox or the various groups of Hasidim in Crown Heights, Williamsburg, or Borough Park, not about the Holocaust, not about mid-twentieth century Brooklyn or the Lower East Side of Manhattan, or about the immigration of Eastern European Jews in the late 19th and early 20th century, which are subjects that have been endlessly covered by many authors over the years, and are usually what we find in books about Jewish people.

While the milieu of upper middle class Brookline, a close-in suburb of Boston, will not be familiar to many, Ridker gets inside it so thoroughly that we feel we know these people, nearly all of whom are Jewish. The author very skillfully takes the characters from what first appeared to be clichés to something much deeper and more profound. The writing is exemplary. It addresses the moral ambiguity of modern American life without preaching. 

In brief, the book covers one year in the life of the Greenspan family. Husband and father Scott is a respected cardiologist, wife and mother Deb is a former dancer who is devoted to liberal causes, daughter Maya works in publishing in New York, and son Gideon is a pre-med student at Columbia. Each of them is faced with a personal crisis that threatens the entire family's status quo and shakes their stability, but the chain of events is set off by financial problems that Scott tries to solve by falsifying the information he provides for clinical trials, which he thinks will pay him the money he needs to extricate himself and his mother, Marjorie, from poor financial choices...until he gets caught.