Peaceful Poseur
Fear and Yoga In New Jersey
Debra Galant
St Martin’s Press, 256 pp., $23.95
REVIEWED BY ELIZABETH WILLSE for the Star-Ledger
July 14, 2008
414 words
Yoga instructors are supposed to be calm. But Nina Gettleman-Summer is having a little trouble taking deep, cleansing breaths. She has a flooded yoga studio, an unemployed husband and a son measuring his spiritual awakening in dollar signs. Now is not a good time for her judgmental, meddling parents to visit.
Galant effortlessly pulls readers into the world of yoga. Even those who can’t tell cobra pose from downward facing dog will laugh at the descriptions of Nina’s studio and students. The overflowing peace fountain that floods her studio is just the first example of Nina’s difficulties in her attempts to sell peace and harmony to affluent suburban women.
The advice of a feng shui expert named Coriander on dispelling bad energy sends an overwhelmed Nina from Chinatown to the Short Hills Mall for a morning of bargain hunting, just when the frazzled yoga instructor really can’t afford to cancel classes.
Nina’s fumbling attempts to place mirrors just so or to purify energy with cloth diapers soaked in sunshine are whimsical, but not entirely disrespectful of the practice. (Galant provides just enough explanation of feng shui for readers to get the jokes.)
Nina’s son Adam and husband Michael are on spiritual searches of their own. Adam wants to rediscover his Jewish roots — especially if they will lead to a lavish bar mitzvah with lots of presents. His process of discovery, seen through typical high school life and a teen’s quest for spiritual growth, is surprisingly touching.
Michael struggles to pull himself together after losing his job as a meteorologist for Newark Liberty International Airport. All he wants to do is sit and watch planes land.
There are a few spots where Galant’s humor seems uneven for the story she’s telling, and this is one of them. While Nina’s and Adam’s parallel spiritual quests lend themselves to her zany sense of comedy, there seems to be more pathos than humor in compounding Michael’s rootlessness and confusion with the pressure to hide his job loss from Nina’s parents. And it may be too soon, in the age of Homeland Security and orange alerts, for misguided airport security to be funny.
That said, native Jerseyan Galant has followed her first novel — “Rattled” (St Martin’s, 2007) — with another wry, comic look at suburban family life. Readers are sure to laugh in recognition (and perhaps wince in sympathy) at the impossible situations she has crafted in “Fear and Yoga in New Jersey.”
