Currently Reading

Reading: My Two Polish Grandfathers, by Witold Rybczynski.
Listening to: Blasphemy, by Douglas Preston.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

An Elinor Lipman Fest

It's only February, and I've already read two new Elinor Lipman novels this year. Ms. Lipman is regularly referred to as the Jane Austen of our time, because of her wise, wry, comic chronicling of modern American life.




Frederica Hatch is a child of the academic world. Her parents, both professors at a second-rate college in the Boston area, make extra money as dorm parents, and Frederica has enjoyed the benefits of dozens of new "older sisters" every year. She is also doted upon by her liberal activist parents, who have always treated her as an adult and a full member of the family. Or so she thought. In My Latest Grievance, the teenaged narrator is dismayed to learn that her father has kept his first marriage a secret from her. His ex-wife, as different from Frederica's Ph. D. mother as it is possible to be, finds a job on the same campus, and Frederica becomes her close friend, partly out of curiosity and partly for revenge.


Meanwhile, in The Family Man, scheduled for publication in May 2009, Ms. Lipman takes on some quite different family dynamics. Henry, once married to Denise and stepfather to her young daughter Thalia, came out as a gay man, after Denise left him for another man. The novel finds him on the point of retirement from the legal profession. Guilt has followed him throughout his life because of his lost relationship with Thalia, and he has surreptitiously kept track of the milestones in her life. When Denise's husband dies, Henry reconnects with Thalia and begins to build a new kind of family life that includes his ex-wife (and her new boyfriend), his stepdaughter, and his own boyfriend, Todd. Ms. Lipman draws each of her oddball characters with affection and humor, and she shows us a family as modern as today.


If you haven't yet read Elinor Lipman, you're in for a treat.