Beach reading with an unsettling edge.
Hilderbrand’s latest Nantucket heroine has a very particular kind of clairvoyance: She can always tell whether a couple is compatible or not.
Dabney Kimball Beech, 49, who heads up Nantucket’s Chamber of Commerce, is known for her headband, pearls, penny loafers and other preppy accoutrements, as well as her fabulous menus for tailgates and picnics. Then there's her track record of spotting perfect matches: If a couple is suited, she sees pink around them; if not, green. So far, her unerring intuition, augmented by artful introductions, has resulted in more than 40 long-term Nantucket marriages. As the wife of John Boxmiller Beech, aka Box, a Harvard economics professor who's frequently summoned to the Oval Office and whose benchmark textbook nets about $3 million a year, Dabney’s domestic life is serene—except that she's never gotten over her high school sweetheart, Clendenin "Clen" Hughes, a Pulitzer-winning journalist whose beat has been, until recently, Southeast Asia. Due to a childhood trauma involving a runaway mother, Dabney has been too phobic to leave Nantucket (except for four years at Harvard). Nearly three decades before, unable to follow in Clen’s globe-trotting footsteps, Dabney banished him from her life and from the life of their daughter, Agnes, who's never met her father, though she knows who he is. Now Clen is back on Nantucket—minus an arm. Agnes is engaged to the uber-rich, controlling and decidedly unclassy sports agent CJ. (This couple is definitely swathed in a green cloud.) Since Box is teaching in Cambridge during the week, the opportunity to resume an affair with Clen proves irresistible to Dabney. The complications mount until, suddenly, Hilderbrand’s essentially sunny setup, bolstered by many summer parties and picnics (and lavishly described meals, particularly seafood), takes a sudden, somber turn. Hilderbrand has a way of transcending the formulaic and tapping directly into the emotional jugular. Class is often an undercurrent in her work, but in this comedy of manners–turned–cautionary tale, luck establishes its own dubious meritocracy.
Beach reading with an unsettling edge.Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-316-09975-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
Putting a nosy neighbor in the position of narrating events she could neither witness nor learn about secondhand is the awkward device that launches this dark comedy about a troubled family, by the author of Island (1992). On the surface, the Arroways seem happy. When elderly Martha Bowker decides to fend off boredom by keeping an eye on them, however, she finds that appearances are deceiving. Father Pete, a ghostwriter, sees himself as weak and has turned to Robert Bly and Batman for strength; he drifts into a flirtation with a business associate about whom he has obsessive fantasies. Mother Liz cares for their three children, her schizophrenic sister Sherri, and her ailing father, but she has isolated herself emotionally since the death 11 years earlier of her daughter Maddy. Liz believes that a ghostly Maddy appears to her in the dark, but she keeps the visitations a secret from Pete, sure that he will try to prove they aren't real. Jake, Katie, and baby Brigit are healthy and growing. But 12-year-old Jake, who believes his father hates him, is convinced that he accidentally killed his sister and his mother lied to protect him. Katie has an invisible friend whom she refuses to give up and Pete refuses to acknowledge. Then Liz finds out about Pete's flirtation, and Pete discovers Liz's obsession with Maddy when he reads her diary. Martha, who has insinuated herself into the Arroway home, waits patiently for a denouement. When Sherri shares Jake's painful secret with the rest of the family, Pete and Liz are finally forced to face the problems arising from their distractions, and the Arroways have a chance of actually becoming the happy family they appear to be. Despite the clumsy narrative premise, Schweighardt looks at domestic problems with honesty and humor.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-877946-44-3
Page Count: 205
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An unsatisfying mix of melodrama and the mundane.
Essayist and novelist Quindlen (Good Dog. Stay., 2007, etc.) tosses a grenade of murderous mayhem into the middle of an otherwise standard-issue novel of manners about an upper-middle-class community in Vermont.
Mary Beth Latham, who runs a landscaping business, and her eye-doctor husband Glen are the parents of 14-year-old twins Alex and Max and 17-year-old Ruby. The first half of the novel is Mary Beth’s self-deprecating yet vaguely self-congratulatory narration of her family’s life. Mary Beth’s marriage to dull but decent Glen continues on middle-aged simmer. Soccer star Alex is as popular in his way as self-confident iconoclast Ruby, who is past her little bout of anorexia. Only Max, geeky and socially awkward, seems to be struggling. Although he does seem to like his therapist—by coincidence a specialist in twins and a twin himself—his only friend is Ruby’s boyfriend Kiernan. But Ruby has outgrown Kiernan, who continues to hang around the house mooning after her and adopting the Lathams as a surrogate family since his own parents’ nasty divorce. Mary Beth deals with small business crises and her Mexican workman. She and her friends commiserate over their children, although not their marriages, in admirable if not quite believable rectitude. Then Kiernan, whose mental problems Mary Beth has either missed or ignored, although they’ll seem pretty apparent to the reader, goes berserk and commits a horrendous act of violence against Mary Beth’s family. Only Mary Beth and Alex survive, and the remainder of the book details their road to emotional recovery. Unfortunately, while Quindlen’s a pro at writing about the quotidian details in the life of a bourgeois Everywoman like Mary Beth, the actual plot is hard to swallow. The murders are too obviously meant to shock. Mary Beth’s guilt over a brief affair she had with Kiernan’s womanizing dad years ago rings false. And the outpouring of support she receives from friends and family is too saccharinely redemptive.
An unsatisfying mix of melodrama and the mundane.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6574-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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