A loaf of challah bread meant to last a week is gone in hours, and she panics. She shovels chips into her daughters’ hands and sends them off to watch TV for the smallest break from responsibility.

The ground beneath her is compressed powder, crumbling with every step. Her husband left finance when Lehman Brothers imploded and then turned to a straggling carpentry business. and impressive literary bona fides but no career.

“We were eighties babies,” Elizabeth explains, “born of plenty, cloistered by our whiteness and the places we were raised … we were both brought up to think that if we checked off certain boxes we’d be fine.” She has an Ivy League Ph.D. They shunned corporate Manhattan, proud to work with their hands. Like Strong, whose life closely mirrors Elizabeth’s, she’s a part of the new genteel poverty, that class of 20-, 30-, 40-something adults raised to delusional cries like “Find your passion!” and “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life!” - who now string together a slew of jobs, forever tired. The narrator, 34-year-old Elizabeth, teaches a college course and works at a high school for “at-risk” (read: minority) students, a place where the CEO drives home the educational mission of “joyfully driven” work with an iron fist. But Lynn Steger Strong’s Want is a defining novel of our age of left-behind families. If all this sounds, well, unpleasant, then I must say I agree with you. But the grueling juggle of a life without wiggle room - feverish toddlers who require nonexistent sick days, clankety delayed trains, sharp stabs of fear about the impossibility of continued existence - traps them. One-hundred thousand dollars in student loans, a $30,000 hospital bill for an unplanned C-section, and dental bills land them squarely into the kind of debt that hovers over your shoulder like a needling specter.

Then, when she is in grad school, they accidentally conceive. A young Brooklyn husband and wife are ambitious and in love. Photo-Illustration: Maya Robinson/Vulture and Photo Courtesy of Publisher

Want by Lynn Steger Strong