LOOK AT US

A family life’s is made both richer and more complicated by the arrival of a new nanny.

Martin and Lily are a seemingly enviable couple: Each has a relatively successful career (Martin with an investment firm as a market analyst and Lily as a corporate lawyer); with the help of Lily’s family money, the two have a spacious home near New York City and live quite well; and they have young twin boys. When their longtime nanny moves to California, she seems irreplaceable until Maeve, a 20-year-old woman newly arrived from Ireland, agrees to be their live-in au pair. Maeve soon becomes integral to the family, bringing joy to the kids, order to the house, and a spark to Lily and Martin’s otherwise monotonous and hollow 8-year-old marriage. Both Martin and Lily struggle to remember how they came to each other and this moment in their lives, especially Martin, who had planned to finish his dissertation, teach economics, and marry a girl from Indiana. Yet the more Lily and Martin’s marriage and their family depend on Maeve to function, the more the couple push to endear themselves to her, including by becoming more sexually adventurous. The unlikability of the central couple is precisely the point, as the novel questions how much substance there is to their lives, yet the narrative fails to find any momentum in this question and is instead weighed down by numerous lengthy flashbacks to Martin’s and Lily’s lives prior to meeting as well as Martin’s musings during bouts of insomnia. It is clear that he has little understanding of either Lily or Maeve or much connection to them, especially in his particularly painful descriptions of their bodies, and this could easily become a novel about his midlife crisis. Sadly, none of these characters become fully realized, and neither does the impetus of the plot.

A story and a main character both in search of meaning.