Every family has its
problems. But even among the most troubled, the Plumb family stands out as
spectacularly dysfunctional. Years of simmering tensions finally reach a
breaking point on an unseasonably cold afternoon in New York City as Melody,
Beatrice, and Jack Plumb gather to confront their charismatic and reckless
older brother, Leo, freshly released from rehab. Months earlier, an inebriated
Leo got behind the wheel of a car with a nineteen-year-old waitress as his
passenger. This accident has endangered the Plumbs' joint trust fund,
“The Nest,” which they are months away from finally receiving. Meant by their
deceased father to be a modest mid-life supplement, the Plumb siblings have
watched The Nest’s value soar along with the stock market and have been
counting on the money to solve a number of self-inflicted problems.
This is a story about the
power of family, the possibilities of friendship, the ways we depend upon one
another and the ways we let one another down.
READ-ALIKES:
For the Posts, a two-week trip to the Balearic island of
Mallorca with their extended family and friends is a celebration: Franny and
Jim are observing their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, and their daughter,
Sylvia, has graduated from high school. But all does not go according to plan: over the
course of the vacation, secrets come to light, old and new humiliations are
experienced, childhood rivalries resurface, and ancient wounds are exacerbated. This is a story of the sides of ourselves that we choose to
show and those we try to conceal, of the ways we tear each other down and build
each other up again, and the bonds that ultimately hold us together.
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband,
she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in
Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect,
and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.
Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed
her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying
allergy to Seattle—and people in general—has made her so agoraphobic that a
virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands.
To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret
correspondence—creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about
misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.
Reclusive literary legend M. M. “Mimi” Banning has been
holed up in her Bel Air mansion for years. But after falling prey to a Bernie
Madoff-style ponzi scheme, she’s flat broke. Now Mimi must write a new book for
the first time in decades, and to ensure the timely delivery of her manuscript,
her New York publisher sends an assistant to monitor her progress. When Alice Whitley arrives at the Banning mansion, she’s put
to work right away—as a full-time companion to Frank, the writer’s eccentric
nine-year-old. As she slowly gets to know Frank, Alice becomes consumed
with finding out who Frank’s father is, how his gorgeous “piano teacher and male role model” Xander fits into the Banning family equation—and
whether Mimi will ever finish that book.
The death of Judd Foxman’s father marks the first time that
the entire Foxman family—including Judd’s mother, brothers, and sister—have
been together in years. Conspicuously absent: Judd’s wife, Jen, whose
fourteen-month affair with Judd’s radio-shock-jock boss has recently become
painfully public. Simultaneously mourning the death of his father and the demise of his marriage,
Judd joins the rest of the Foxmans as they reluctantly submit to their
patriarch’s dying request: to spend the seven days following the funeral
together. In the same house. Like a family.
As the week quickly spins out of control, longstanding grudges resurface,
secrets are revealed, and old passions reawakened. For Judd, it’s a weeklong
attempt to make sense of the mess his life has become while trying in vain not
to get sucked into the regressive battles of his madly dysfunctional family.
All of which would be hard enough without the bomb Jen dropped the day Judd’s
father died: She’s pregnant.
The summer that Nixon
resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable.
Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth
through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction
diverge. The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always
enough to propel someone through life at age thirty; not everyone can sustain,
in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence.
The friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their talents have become and the shapes their lives have taken. Wide in scope, ambitious, and populated by complex characters who come together and apart in a changing New York City, The Interestings explores the meaning of talent; the nature of envy; the roles of class, art, money, and power; and how all of it can shift and tilt precipitously over the course of a friendship.
The friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their talents have become and the shapes their lives have taken. Wide in scope, ambitious, and populated by complex characters who come together and apart in a changing New York City, The Interestings explores the meaning of talent; the nature of envy; the roles of class, art, money, and power; and how all of it can shift and tilt precipitously over the course of a friendship.
Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive.
Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan
brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other
characters whose paths intersect with theirs. With music pulsing on every page, A
Visit from the Goon Squad is a startling, exhilarating novel of
self-destruction and redemption.
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