“‘My moth­er was raised an Ortho­dox Jew and then became an Ortho­dox Freudi­an, so she pathol­o­gized me with reli­gious fer­vor,’ Louise told the ordi­nary-look­ing young man sit­ting next to her. ​‘It real­ly fucked me up.’” So begins Sarah Yah­m’s accom­plished debut, Unfin­ished Acts of Wild Cre­ation, prepar­ing the read­er for a nov­el of wit, sear­ing intel­li­gence, and self-awareness.

And she deliv­ers. Unfin­ished Acts of Wild Cre­ation is a bit­ing and heart­break­ing work of fic­tion. Book­end­ed by mor­tal­i­ty and renew­al, the sto­ry spans forty years as it traces one fam­i­ly’s bat­tle with an unnamed, incur­able hered­i­tary dis­ease — with ample neu­ro­sis and dark laughs along the way. 

When acer­bic Louise Rakoff meets Leon Rosen­berg in 1974, her moth­er has just died. Their moth­er-daugh­ter rela­tion­ship was fraught, to say the least. But there is some­thing about grief that fuels desire, and soon Leon and Louise are off and enmeshed in their own romance and mar­riage. As their daugh­ter, Lydia, grows, her over­ac­tive brain over­whelms her child’s body with spi­ral­ing thoughts and debil­i­tat­ing OCD. Soon the fam­i­ly learns that the rare degen­er­a­tive ill­ness that plagued Louise’s moth­er is worm­ing through the matri­lin­eal line. Louise, now afflict­ed, must reck­on with a hor­ri­ble choice — sub­ject Lydia to her pro­tract­ed decline or spare her daugh­ter the dai­ly excru­ci­a­tion by abscond­ing to Israel to die with­out her hus­band and only child by her side?

Like those of many great nov­el­ists, Yah­m’s con­cerns are both inti­mate and expan­sive. Her sen­tences have teeth. ​“Louise hat­ed it when [Leon] looked at her like a wild ani­mal he was fig­ur­ing out how to tame.” Her char­ac­ters are not here to make friends: ​“Each time [Lydia] refrained from being an ass­hole, she gave her­self per­mis­sion to be an ass­hole in a yet-to-be deter­mined future con­text.” Con­tra­dic­tion is so deeply embed­ded in the psy­che it’s prac­ti­cal­ly a com­fort. “[Louise’s] entire six­teen years of moth­er­hood were defined by this con­tra­dic­tion — the desire to sleep for­ev­er next to your child, hun­gri­ly breath­ing in her skin, and the equal and oppo­site urge to escape.” Unfin­ished Acts is a nov­el in which two truths, at min­i­mum, are always present; a nov­el wracked by cohe­sion and dis­il­lu­sion; a nov­el that voic­es ques­tions around life’s pur­pose, ulti­mate­ly cling­ing to the buoy of love and work as means to stay ground­ed, present, and togeth­er when a fam­i­ly, a per­son, a body, is being torn apart.

Thanks to Yah­m’s mas­ter­ful char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, the read­er becomes so invest­ed in the Rosen­bergs and their saga that cer­tain moments (such as when Louise runs off to a kib­butz in an act of either altru­ism or nar­cis­sism) are mad­den­ing. Mean­while, as Louise and Lydi­a’s rumi­na­tions sky­rock­et, Leon becomes all but a saint. It’s all an intend­ed effect of the close­ness Yahm has cul­ti­vat­ed. Who has­n’t felt frus­trat­ed by their own fam­i­ly members? 

At one point, Lydi­a’s boyfriend breaks up with her by say­ing, ​“You’re bril­liant, hilar­i­ous, and one of the most cre­ative peo­ple I’ve ever met, but your brain is always buzzing.” That’s when what­ev­er twinges of impa­tience we may have felt melts away, giv­ing way to grat­i­tude. After all, we are ​“all pris­on­ers of our con­text.” What an immense gift to be arrest­ed by — and wel­comed whole­heart­ed­ly into — the work­ings of such an elec­tric, prob­ing mind.