Judy Blume Is Back With In the Unlikely Event, a Portrait of a Town Under Siege

Bookended by a two-part epilogue set in 1987, In the Unlikely Event is a portrait of a town under siege. Within a two-month span in the winter of 1951–52, three airplanes en route from Newark Airport crashed into Blume’s hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, killing passengers and townspeople and narrowly missing even greater disasters. Blume paints a picture of Elizabeth, an insular but subtly divided town, through snapshots of three generations of the Ammerman family, those in their social circle, and victims of the trio of disasters. Survivor responses range from anger to grief to madness, as Elizabeth’s residents question whether it’s a conspiracy or a Communist plot that has them in its sights.
Miri Ammerman is the heart of the book and the star of its epilogue. She’s a 15-year-old girl who covets cashmere and her best friend’s nuclear family, and is thunderstruck by first love when it arrives at a basement dance—and by paranoia and hopelessness as the crashes topple her sense of the world as a basically decent place. Her mother, Rusty, had a child too young and never got her love life back on track, though her own mother, Irene, finds herself comforting a crash widower. Rusty’s brother, Henry, is a journalist with big ambitions, and mixed feelings about making his name on the victims of the crash.
But others suffer far worse fates than Miri’s shattered innocence: a college-bound teen loses his will to live when a girl he dreamed of starting a romance with is killed, and one girl’s startling identification with a beautiful young crash victim has eerie ramifications. Homes are destroyed with their occupants inside them, and children aren’t spared. The crashes provide the story with a frightening structure—one is a tragedy, two a terror, but three seems like an act of God. Characters pushed to the breaking point are, we know, about to be struck again by something no one should have to endure.
Blume is a humanistic writer whose intimate third-person eye finds no story too small to tell. There are no villains in this novel but fate, no horrors but the uncaring eye of the universe. It’s a perfect novel for readers who grew up on Blume’s kid and teen classics, combining the earthy physicality of Forever or Wifey with the pensive but never elegiac touch of her most recent adult novel, Summer Sisters. In the character of Fern, a tiny girl obsessed with cowboys and penises, you’ll find echoes of the irritating younger siblings of classics like Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing. Blume writes about everything, from the profound to the profane, with wry humanity and a subtle eye for the ridiculous. We’re so glad she’s back.
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