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The first thing I wanna know is: how far along are we on the tv adaptation? Is it still in development??? Book came out in 2022 and it’s now 2025. Do I have no idea how slowly this process goes? (Prolly.) Also—getting my snob out—maybe it won’t compare to the book anyway.

Premise is a bit of a doozy. We start in the 1970s with the meeting of the matriarch and patriarch of the Oppenheimer family at a funeral. If that isn’t dour enough, it’s the funeral of the patriarch, Salo’s, college girlfriend who was killed in a car crash where he was driving. :0 Honestly, it’s not about the melodrama (though Kozloff’s writing could be very funny.) Generational trauma is a backbone of this story.

In longer-ago past, the (fake 21st century) Oppenheimer’s are descended from the (real) Joseph Oppenheimer, a 18th century “court Jew� who was tortured and executed, almost definitely on trumped up charges, and then proverbially resuscitated by Goebbels for Nazi Judenrein propaganda. A colorful piece of history, perhaps, and I’m always drawn to Jewish history. But it also speaks to generational trauma, which we see play out in the 21st century. Salo, feeling he doesn’t deserve happiness, is an absentee father who retreats into his own passions and a long-drawn affair with another survivor of the crash.

His three triplets (born in the 1980s during early in vitro treatments) are not warm, loving and connected to one another, and I think that has to do with trauma. In part; obviously nothing is that simple. But Salo was largely absent and their mother, Joanna, was grasping for a fictional salve for her husband and perfection for the family. Some might argue the triplets being “test tube babies� also played a part in the dysfunction, but that doesn’t feel genuine to me. …speaking as another early 80s baby who is here due to fertility treatment, so. :P

Yup: many of the main characters of this novel (triplets Harrison, Lewyn and Sally) are from my generation! Just a couple years older than me. In all honestly, I’m not sure all the cultural touchstones were there. The prep school they attended engaged in the sort of leftist ideology that I’m not sure hit the scene until closer to the modern day (then again, maybe they were pioneers. :P) There were nods, later, to the dearth of social media, but nothing in real time about listening to the Dave Matthews band on a non-skip CD player before exams! Honestly, I’m watching a lot of “millennial nostalgia� TikToks right now, where my middle-aged generation is trying to reclaim our youth by rocking out to jock jams and �90s rap. But I digress!)

The novel takes off when the triplets go to college—Lewyn and Sally to their father’s alma mater, Cornell, and Harrison to a two-year pre-Harvard prep school where he’d study western canon (your Plato and Aristotle) and look after chickens. His trajectory takes him into a right-wing space, accompanied by Eli Absalom Stone, a formerly impoverished, self-taught Black peer fiercely devoted to meritocracy.

Harrison, already elitist and distant from the family, has found “his people.� The schism between Sally and Lewyn stings more, as their mutual plan to deny each other’s existence on campus leads to a Greek tragedy with their peers around the same time that Salo, at long last, is planning to leave the Oppenheimer brood. I won’t spoil the date in history, except to say that the tragedy is bigger than expected.

Also during this time: Joanna has discovered the affair and takes drastic measures herself to have a do-over with a “latecomer� child—Phoebe, who in fact was a fourth embryo, kept frozen since the 1980s. Phoebe plays a major part in the latter part of this story with regards to trying to piece her fractured family back together.

Korelitz throws everything and the kitchen sink into this—Harrison’s rise to MAGA-whisperer, Lewyn’s passion for Mormonism-turned-art history, and Sally as a closeted lesbian who finds purpose in antiquing and cleaning out old houses. There’s also a decent amount of Judaism, including a hilariously awkward college Passover seder. Listing it out like this feels trite, but the language and the character development say otherwise. One of my favorite authors, Allegra Goodman, wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “The Oppenheimers dare you to love them � and even when you don’t, you cannot look away. The triplets are simply too original, too searching, too driven.�

Maybe I can dip into enough cynicism to question if the ending comes too easily. I will say—fangirl moment—I would have loved a resolution scene between Lewyn and Sally regarding their young adult foibles from almost two decades past, but to be fair we were in Phoebe’s head by then (about to embark on a collegiate journey herself.) Harrison perhaps rejoins the family because of a “gotcha� development with Eli, which maybe didn’t feel personal enough to him except that secrets obviously sting. An already sprawling novel, maybe it wasn’t fair to ask Korelitz for even more of a psychological deep dive. How does she feel about a sequel? :P (She wrote a sequel to one of her more popular books, after all!)

This is a promising book for redemption without sentimentality, for the promise that there can be meaning after trauma, and meaning in our relationships. It is never too late.