During one particularly stressful college semester, I watched all six seasons of I Love Lucy. My Wednesdays looked like this: wake up, go to class, panic-finish an essay during my lunch break and then, during my single free hour before driving to work, sit down and watch two back-to-back episodes of a 1950s sitcom.
All this to say, I’m no stranger to classic American TV programs, which is why I devoured Jennifer Niven’s latest historical fiction novel, Meet the Newmans.
Set against the glittering facade of 1960s Hollywood, Meet the Newmans follows America’s favorite TV Family, Del and Dinah Newman and their sons, Shep and Guy. For the last two decades, they’ve played idealized sitcom versions of themselves for millions of viewers. But now it’s 1964. The world is changing, TV is making the jump to technicolor, and suddenly, the Newmans’ picture-perfect family feels woefully out of touch. When Del ends up in a coma post car crash, Dinah hires Juliet Dunne, a young, outspoken reporter, to secretly help her write the show’s final episode. The two hold very different ideas of what it means to be a woman in the 60s and, as a result, different ideas for how Dinah’s stereotypical housewife character should end her narrative arc—both onscreen and off. Dinah and Juliet exist in juxtaposition, but they are not each other’s enemy. Instead, Niven uses their conflicting experiences to craft a tentative celebration of sisterhood, a shift that mirrors the changing landscape of 1964 America.
Though Meet the Newmans takes place in the past, these conversations still feel remarkably topical. Reproductive rights and queer liberation. Marriage and motherhood and being a woman in a deeply patriarchal society. There is no snappy, on-page resolution to these issues. The characters don’t get a flashy, sitcom happy ending and, to the same extent, neither do we. We’re still fighting to maintain many of those same rights today, more than sixty years later. In that sense, the book is not only a twentieth-century time capsule, but a reflection of our own modern hopes and values.
Meet the Newmans is a sharp, warm-hearted love letter to TV and the women who made it. Highly recommended for fans of Lessons in Chemistry and Taylor Jenkins Reid.
