At the end of what is (she cannot help observing) an extraordinary life, Elisabeth Rother has decided to write her memoirs. She brushes aside her narrow escape with her Jewish husband from the Nazis, and the perilous voyage to the New World of New Jersey. The subject that really consumes her is the waywardness of her impossible daughter, Renate, and her granddaughter, Irene.
Renate performs autopsies on the bodies of politicians whom death has harvested in the nighttime arms of their mistresses. Worse, she sleeps on unironed sheets. Irene drops out of school to roam the world, refuses to correct her nose with plastic surgery, and shows alarming signs of enjoying sex. What is to be done with such women?
A curiously touching love letter to the difficult but sustaining love of mothers and daughters, The Empress of Weehawken is a masterpiece of comedy with an unexpected lilt of redemption at its close.
"Incredibly witty, beautifully written… 'The Empress of Weehawken' is a potent stew of class, sex and religion, as well as cultural and generational clashes, and Dische crafts a glorious misanthrope in her fictionalized version of her grandmother."
The Star-Ledger
"Brilliant… discomfitingly funny… [Dische's] narrator is as winning and willful as any reader could wish for… [A] marvelous exploration of honor and identity, greed, sacrifice and just deserts… Just as Dische's staccato rhythms and deadpan sentences stretch into lyricism, so too what seems stark, even cynical, moves into an entirely unsentimental, deeply satisfying (and sometimes scary) love."
Newsday
"Self-centered, insufferable narrators are hardly strangers to contemporary fiction, but it helps if they're as funny as they are grandiloquent. …The voice of the reprobate-empress here is pitch-perfect…Dische has captured this fictionalized grandmother…with pepper and grace."
