It Is Enough

“A family album: leather-bound, thin, its pages yellow with age. There are images on every page—black and white to start with, then Kodacolor.” So begins Nicholas Delbanco’s new novel, It Is Enough, a chronicle of the German-Jewish Hochmann family, which is also a chronicle of the twentieth century and its repercussions here and now. While Frederick Hochmann, a widower, looks back on his long life from New Canaan, Connecticut, the drama of his family’s past surges to the surface. Ranging from Berlin to Berkeley, from the 1930s to the 2010s, from scenes of the greatest tenderness to the greatest callowness, It Is Enough is the work of one of the most accomplished American prose stylists since Henry James.