NO ORDINARY MATTER

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Veronica, a soap opera writer who is small, dark, and accommodating, has little in common with her older sister Lillian, a neuroscientist who is tall, blonde and intolerant.  Nevertheless, for the past fourteen years–since their mother moved to New Zealand–they have been meeting on the first Monday morning of every month at the Hungarian Pastry Shop on the Upper West Side. No Ordinary Matter begins on Valentine’s Day 2000, the twenty-fifth anniversary of their father’s death in a car crash.  During the sisters’ritual encounter at the neighborhood cafe, Lillian surprises Veronica with the announcement that she has succeeded in becoming pregnant – and that the father of her child is an “out-of-work” actor she picked up in a bar and who is none the wiser about his impending paternity. The ensuing story, which unravels over the course of Lillian’s pregnancy, involves a mysterious father, an estranged mother, a long lost brother, sisterhood, an impulsive marriage, a honeymoon, an annulment, three detectives, several car accidents, a musical, and incest. The fast-paced narrative full of coincidences and contingencies reads like the fictional equivalent of Chaos Theory and yet this fantastical world is rendered delightfully ordinary.  Ultimately, the novel explores the meaning of family and the competing, overlapping and intersecting roles that science, will, desire, accident, and chance play in shaping our lives. With No Ordinary Matter, Jenny McPhee’s fiction continues to be “an elegant inquiry into the randomness of love and the glory of fate.” (Entertainment Weekly)