Emigré forms self-absorbed center of amusing 'Empress'

The Empress of Weehawken
By Irene Dische
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 307 pp., $24

Self-centered, insufferable narrators are hardly strangers to contemporary fiction, but it helps if they're as funny as they are grandiloquent. Elisabeth Rother, the brutally appealing voice of "The Empress of Weehawken," manages this in her first sentence: "Much of what went kaput, as the Americans say, in the generations after mine can be blamed on Carl's low sperm count." There we have her stance on most of life in her opening volley: straightforward, sexually frank, and indicting everyone around her for her troubles.

Frau Professor Doktor Rother, as she likes to be known, is also the titular empress of the novel, named so by her husband, Carl, when they fled Germany for New Jersey in the 1930s. An army nurse during the First World War, Elisabeth met Carl, a surgeon, over the operating table in an army field hospital; he was a Jew from Upper Silesia and she was an imperious German Catholic, but she allowed him the privilege of marrying her after he converted to her faith. One of the equivocal legacies of that marriage is an incorrigible granddaughter named Irene -- whose presence on earth has partly inspired this "gory little narrative." By insinuating herself into the story with such immediate familiarity, Irene Dische paves the way to relay the story of her maternal grandmother in all her bigoted and unapologetic vainglory.

The first-person voice of the novel is both its gift and its license, for no one could possibly depict Elisabeth in so true and condemning a measure as she is able to do herself. She is a hypochondriacal drama queen (she announces the year of her death regularly to anyone who will listen); she is wildly overweight (she loves butter cookies and keeps a plate nearby); her grotesquely innocent narcissism -- basking in her own Aryan birthright -- has made her unabashedly anti-Semitic. But she also struggles to protect Carl's relatives when they are arrested by the SS in the early 1930s, marching down to the police station and demanding their release. Her bigotry, in other words, is not complicated enough to be a treachery of the soul. Kind in spite of herself, Elisabeth stands up to anyone who gets in her way, whether that obstacle is an unruly child or the entire Third Reich. When her wildly talented daughter, Renate, is branded "Jewess" when she tries to give a piano recital in 1936, Elisabeth ships her off to Catholic school, then gets her husband out of Germany.

The center of "The Empress of Weehawken" concerns the ensuing postwar years in America: Carl's efforts to build a practice as the "German doctor" in a neighborhood of immigrants; Renate's emergence from musical prodigy into academic upstart, marrying an older scientist whose tics and phobias make Elisabeth seem apple-pie normal. Dische is a virginal biochemist who sleeps on a sofa in his kitchen and reads Greek for leisure; when he stops his mental lathers long enough to notice Renate, he marries her -- a fitting partnership for them both, since Renate is too smart for anything more provincial. She finishes a doctorate, then a medical degree, finds a home in pathology (and the New York City morgue). Two children are born of this kooky union: Little Carl and Irene, our creator's self-creation. Somehow they survive the idiosyncrasies of their childhood, most likely because of the indomitable Liesel, the Rothers' maid in Germany whom Elisabeth has seen fit to import to Weehawken. Wild and fearful at once, Irene proves her mettle -- claims her place in this family of firebrand women -- by appearing innocently at her school's show-and-tell one day with her own surprise: a few pickled embryos she's smuggled out of her mother's lab.

If its narrator were its most compelling character, this story of three generations of women might well suffer from imbalance, but Dische has made them all equally indomitable. There are deaths and divorces and more than one shocking maternal cruelty throughout the novel, but each offspring manages to stand up to her predecessor, and the voice of Elisabeth -- "sin of negligence," she'll say, as her own accuser -- is so evenhanded that every contender comes out fighting. The young Irene, having survived a family of women who seem by terms abusive and comic, goes on to violate every societal dictate in sight; she trades in the nylon stockings and high manners of boarding school for a tour of Europe from the back of a stranger's motorcycle. Elisabeth, resolute even in the face of death, manages to give us a bird's-eye view of such shenanigans from beyond the grave.

The staccato wisdom of "The Empress of Weehawken" devolves occasionally into weary repetition; it's difficult to relay a story this desultory -- its many decades and life events -- without being bound to the "and-then" laws of chronology. But for the most part the voice of the reprobate-empress here is pitch-perfect. And Dische has captured this fictionalized grandmother -- she gives a nod to the real-life inspiration in an author's note -- with pepper and grace.

Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com.