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Allegra Goodman '89.TOM HERDE/BOSTON GLOBE

Goodman had not set out to write a novel over the eight years it took her to write Markowitz. "I just sat down to write different stories," she says. "More recently I thought about the patterns in them and put them together." The writing was interspersed with work on a Ph.D. in English from Stanford; she has finally finished her dissertation. But the product of her gradual creative process is unusual: a series of subtly shifting vantage points, so that the reader encounters a given character through many pairs of eyes.

A sympathetic third-person narrator introduces the family's matriarch, Rose, in the days leading up to her second husband's death. Later though, Rose appears through the eyes of Alma, a Stanford graduate student interviewing elderly women about the socioeconomic conditions under which they grew up. Rose is frustratingly impervious to Alma's political agenda, and through a charming mixture of dissembling and sheer obliviousness, she manages to sidestep the young woman's loaded questions.

Rose's character, which Goodman developed over a long time, has sparked many letters from readers dealing with elderly parents. Goodman wanted her portrayal of Rose to transcend sentimental grandma stereotypes and show "how she manipulates people and uses guilt." The author says that Rose is, ironically, "full of energy, but she exhausts everyone around her."

Goodman sees the book's changing points of view as a tool for debunking "personal subjective mythologies" and showing "the difference between people's own perceptions of their life stories and other people's." The limitations of each character's point of view are a source for much of the humor and introspection in Markowitz..

But according to Goodman, her own life story is absent from the book, which is already in its fifth printing. Not only do her husband, David Karger '89, who teaches at MIT, and their children, Ezra and Gabriel, never enter its pages, but she is also able to evoke locales such as Venice Beach and the University of Minnesota after spending only minimal time there. "I write other people's autobiographies," she explains.

Although Goodman's writing places demands on her own family, such as book readings and tours, her husband has been supportive of her career since their dating days in college. "David's a creative spirit," she says. "He's a theoretical computer scientist who walks around in circles mumbling to himself and comes up with algorithms."

For a couple who married at the Cronkhite Center the August after graduation, Cambridge is familiar stomping grounds. But after a year at Oxford and four at Stanford, Goodman finds it odd in some ways to return. "It's strange to be back in the same physical place while I'm in such a different place in life," she says. "It's funny to come back with a stroller."

~Miriam Udel Lambert

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