Jean Hanff Korelitz Triplet Tale Better ‘Late’ Than Never

By Michael Malone

“The Latecomer” is the story of a wealthy New York family in an immense house on the Brooklyn Esplanade, overlooking lower Manhattan. Salo Oppenheimer runs an investment firm and collects pricey art. Johanna raises the triplets.

Ah, those triplets. The crux of the story. They want nothing to do with each other. Ever. It’s not that they even fight all that much. They just pretend the others do not exist.

Two of them, Lewyn and Sally, even head off to Cornell together, where Salo graduated from, and do not tell anybody at college that their sibling is also there. In the adjacent dorm, in fact. That makes things a bit confusing when Lewyn begins dating Sally’s roommate, Rochelle. She notes to Lewyn that he and her roommate happen to have the same last name, but Lewyn says Oppenheimer is a common surname.

The other triplet is Harrison, who has his eye on an Ivy League school, too, but ends up at an odd little rural college called Roarke in New Hampshire, where the tiny student body learns to milk cows and tend to chickens while taking brainy classes before typically moving on to elite universities. An academic he admires praised Roarke, and so Harrison left Brooklyn Heights to milk cows in The Granite State.

A description of the trio goes, “Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally were normal young people in just about every obvious way, well educated (despite what even [Johanna] recognized as [private school] Walden’s worst tendencies), globally aware, and not even particularly acquisitive, despite our astonishing privilege. Individually they were a credit to themselves, if not to her.

“But as a family, they were still a failure.”

An incident during Salo’s time at Cornell decades before haunts the Oppenheimer family for the duration of the book. He was driving when an accident occurred, killing his girlfriend, and injuring another woman in the car, who Salo reconnects with much later in life.

Johanna sees that her marriage to Salo is foundering and, with the triplets off to college, comes up with the wild idea to take the fourth IVF frozen embryo – the other three became Lewyn, Sally and Harrison – and have another child.

The marriage does not improve. Salo decides to start a new life on the West Coast. He is killed in an incident that, in real life, is part of American history from two decades ago.

We see that fourth kid, Phoebe, as a teen. She’s cool and fun to follow. But can she pull off the impossible and bring the triplets who ignore each other a little closer together?

“I think you were born at the exact right time, and I have a feeling your sister and brothers would agree,” Johanna tells her teen daughter. “You’re not some random person we were all saddled with, you know. You were their missing piece, and they owe you a lot. All of them. All of us.”

“The Latecomer,” by Jean Hanff Korelitz, is a highly entertaining novel. Korelitz has a unique and fun story to tell, and delivers it with considerable aplomb. Harrison, Lewyn and Sally are distinctive characters – Harrison is a serious a–hole – and Phoebe makes up for lost time in her own idiosyncratic way.

My one issue is that Korelitz is a wee bit casual with some important coincidences. Great authors build up plot-shifting coincidences carefully, often over dozens or even hundreds of carefully constructed pages. I felt the author rendered the coincidence of Lewyn dating Sally’s roommate, and Phoebe running into Ephraim, a Brooklyn guy with a vital connection to the Oppenheimer family, in a more free-and-easy manner than I would’ve preferred, and that an author of her skill might’ve pulled off.

The book came out in 2022. Harrison Oppenheimer emerges from Roarke, then Harvard, as an intellectual touting MAGA beliefs, with frequent appearances on Fox News, much to the consternation of his siblings, and old Walden School classmates.

Sally ends up in the antiques business, while Lewyn dabbles in Mormonism and inherits his father’s love of art, writing frequently about the paintings he finds fascinating.

Korelitz’s other novels include “The Plot,” “The Devil and Webster” and “Admission.” I previously reviewed “The Plot,” a terrific story about an author in a cold streak after a smash debut who, on a crummy teaching assignment, stumbles upon a student with a million-dollar plot who later dies prematurely, and borrows the student’s story for his next book.

“The Latecomer” has a strong 4.01 rating, out of 5, from 32,600 reviewers on GoodReads. It probably deserves better.

A review in The New York Times says, “The Latecomer is consistently surprising. Its protagonists reinvent themselves with astonishing ingenuity. Fair warning to readers seeking ‘likable characters’: The people here are fierce, and they fight dirty. The Oppenheimers dare you to love them – and even when you don’t, you cannot look away. The triplets are simply too original, too searching, too driven.”

Too original is not a bad way to be. And “The Latecomer” is just that.

Journalist Michael Malone lives in Hawthorne with his wife and two children.