Cathleen Schine, _The Grammarians_

 IF YOU ARE looking for a brisk, deftly-executed contemporary novel of manners, serious and intelligent but not heavy, this is a good bet for you. Our book club liked it.

Laurel and Daphne Wolfe are identical twins, baby boomers, New Yorkers, Jewish (but not especially observant), and from the dawn of their interwoven consciousnesses devotees of language. As toddlers, they devise their own; as children, they spend hours with their father’s Unabridged Webster’s (second edition, N.B.). They both marry, they both have one daughter, and they both pursue careers centered on language. 

Daphne goes from being a copy editor at a Village Voice-like publication to writing a William Safire-like column pouncing on people for deviations from standard formal English. Laurel, at first an elementary school teacher, establishes a literary career with poems and stories based on found material, namely the correspondence of the unlettered, drawing on the power of demotic speech, the eloquence of the uneducated.

In short, Daphne is a prescriptivist, Laurel a descriptivist. For Daphne, the right use of language involves maintaining rules and standards. For Laurel, whatever we say or write is “right,” so long as it communicates, and all the old schoolroom rules about agreement, not splitting infinitives, and not ending a sentence with a preposition are just so much pointless policing. Estrangement ensues.

According to one review I saw, Schine’s inspiration was Esther Lederer (aka Ann Landers) and Pauline Phillips (aka “Dear Abby”), identical twins who wound up in the same line of work and famously did not get along.

As a novelist, Schine knows her craft. The point of view is more often Daphne’s in the first half of the novel, more often Laurel’s in the second half, but Schine keeps it mobile and interesting. She has a neat trick of fast-forwarding between chapters, so to speak, skipping over events an ordinary novel might narrate, e.g., if Daphne becomes pregnant in one chapter, in the next she will have a toddler. This creates a few “wait, what?” moments, but aids immensely in keeping the book moving.

And the last chapter, brilliantly, is from the point of view of the twins’ mother and is in the future tense. Can’t say more without giving too much away, but what a great choice on Schine’s part.