Laura Dave’s Novels

Last week, I commented on Laura Dave's 2007 novel, London is the Best City in America.   I liked it enough to seek out and read two of her other books, both of which are quite good.

 

The First Husband is her newest novel, just published in May. It has nothing to do with a female president's spouse.  Rather, it's a story about the uncertainties and imperfections that people are bound to face in their romantic relationships and the difficulties people sometimes face in making choices of the heart.

The novel is humorous and intelligent.  ★★★☆☆

 

 

 

 

Even better, in my view, is Dave's 2009 novel, The Divorce Party.  It's set amidst high society in the Hamptons. We see a couple divorcing after a marriage of 35 years, and they decide to host an oh-so-fashionable "divorce party" to celebrate their years together and to welcome whatever comes next.  The divorce is occurring because the husband has developed another consuming interest — ostensibly, Buddhist thought and meditation — that takes him away from attention to his wife and their life together.  Of course, as the wife discovers, the real distraction for hubby is not Buddhist thought at all, but a cute, younger ladylove he's seeing on the side — someone for whom he is willing to blow up a marriage of more than three decades.  Sounds tragically familiar, doesn't it?

The immediate pleasure of the novel is that, unbeknownst to her husband, the wife has hired his ladylove, a caterer, to handle the divorce party.  Tragedy and comedy ensue. 

The greater pleasure of the novel is Laura Dave's wise and moving observations about marriages and relationships — and about delusions, the pursuit of which leads people to make stupid decisions.  A wise and intelligent book.  ★★★★★

 

“The Paris Wife,” by Paula McLain

I've done lots of reading in the past ten days, too much to report in any detail.  So, I'll simply comment on the best of the five novels and note the others.  The best is good literature; the others are beach reads of varying quality.

 

Paula McLain's The Paris Wife is a luminous look at the young Ernest Hemingway and his crowd of Paris compatriots in the 1920s, seen through the eyes of his first wife, Hadley Richardson.  Though a fictional rendering of that time in Hemingway's life, McLain's novel is thoroughly informed by biographies of Hemingway and by his own writings. Consequently, the reader learns a lot about the great author (the bad as well as the good) and the people with whom he surrounded himself — Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and others.   To me, the book felt much like Nancy Horan's fine novel about Frank Lloyd Wright, Loving Frank, an intimate portrait of a great (but deeply flawed) figure on the American landscape. 

This is an excellent novel. ★★★★★

 

And here are four other novels to consider.  

The Arrivals, by Meg Mitchell Moore — A story about empty nesters whose adult children, each facing problems of different kinds, find themselves gravitating back home to their parents' home one summer in Burlington, Vermont.  The characters, dialogue, and human dramas are very real.    ★★★★☆ 

 

London is the Best City in America, by Laura Dave — A story about a young woman whose brother's impending wedding forces her to revisit her own decision three years earlier to abandon her fiance right before her planned nuptials — and to deal with her brother's ambivalence on the weekend of his wedding.  This is a really skillful novel that nicely captures the angst and paralyzing indecision that many twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings feel when facing life's big decisions.  ★★★★☆

These Things Hidden, by Heather Gudenkauf — A story about a young woman, recently released from five years in prison for a heinous crime, who tries to fit back into an unwelcoming community and to reconnect with family members who want nothing to do with her.  It's partly a suspense novel, partly a domestic novel. Though it has some flaws, it's diverting entertainment.   ★★★☆☆

 

Heat Wave, by Nancy Thayer — A story about a young woman (32) whose husband has just died of a heart problem, leaving her house-rich but cash-poor, and needing to find a way to support their two young daughters.  They live on Nantucket, so the island itself is, of course, a strong presence in the book, as are the young woman's close female friends, in-laws, and a particularly handsome and available man who was her late husband's best friend.   It's not a bad book, but Thayer is one of those authors whose characters address each other directly by name far more often than people do in real life, distracting the reader (this one, anyway) from some of the book's qualities.  All in all, if you want a good beach read that's set on Nantucket, you're better off going with any of Elin Hilderbrand's books.     ★★☆☆☆