5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Tongue-in-cheek premise goes awry..., March 28, 2008
This review is from: The Adultery Club (Paperback)
Nicholas Lyon is a divorce attorney from London. Over and over, he has to listen to frightened husbands and scornful wives jabber about adultery and alimony rights. It's a good thing he is smarter than those people. He is happily married to a beautiful chef and author of cookbooks, and at forty-three, he is older and wiser and would never make the sort of mistakes his clients make. Well, we know what's coming. Sara Kaplan is nowhere near as attractive as Nick's wife, but there is something intriguing and sensual about the twenty-five-year-old new blood at his law firm. Desire seeps through him whenever they spend time together, and in spite of his Herculean efforts to resist her, it is almost impossible to do so. Malinche Lyon, Nick's wife, has a brilliant career of her own and dotes on her three daughters with the help of her gay best friend. She loves Nick and adores her family. But she can't help but ask herself if this is as good as life will ever get for her. After all, she's been married for ten years; she's in her mid thirties, still young and beautiful. Ten more years of the same thing sound very daunting. And that is why she is faced with a temptation of her very own...
The premise is interesting. I like how we get the three points of view and how the stories and situations fuse together. Tess Stimson does a wonderful job doing that, which is why she gets two stars. However, I was disappointed with the execution. I enjoy reading novels that have a dark voice and storyline, and I've also enjoyed novels whose main characters aren't very likable (Love Creeps by Amanda Filipacchi and In the Drink by Kate Christensen spring to mind), but this author succeeded in making these characters so unlikable that I literally couldn't stand them. Malinche is the one I identified with the most, the least unlikable one, which surprised me because I thought I'd be more on Sara's side, being single and all. Nicholas is simply insufferable. I read novels written by men for (mainly) men all the time. I'm a big fan of Jonathan Tropper, Nick Hornby and a few others. I also grew up with four brothers, and I know very well how men talk and think when they're strewn together. But I think that Stimson took the whole men-think-about-sex-and-their-organs-every-sixty-seconds thing a little too literal. Nicholas doesn't go two paragraphs without mentioning his genitals. The slightest thing causes him to have an erection. And reading about the uncomfortable state of his privates during a meeting, phone conversation, party or wherever he, his wife and/or Sara were gathered annoyed me. Three-hundred and sixty-something pages of reading this became exhausting, and I had to force myself to finish this book. The Adultery Club could have been a clever, tongue-in-cheek approach to marriage and infidelity. Alas, it isn't, at least not by my measure. Stimson has written another novel in this vein called The Infidelity Chain. Uh, I think I'll pass on that one.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Well written book about unsympathetic people, February 18, 2008
This review is from: The Adultery Club (Paperback)
The main characters in this book are almost completely unlikeable.
the man is unable to go more than 2 sentences before referencing his genitals, and this continues through the whole book. his entire reason for loving his wife seems to center around their sex life and various sexual acts she's performed for him. he puts forth absolutely no effort to avoid having an affair. he's a pompous, arrogant jerk, plain and simple, and i heartily disliked him by the second page.
the mistress is just a nasty little piece of work who assumes she's smarter/better/prettier than anyone has a right to be. she sets her sights on a married man and decides it's ok since his wife is probably boring. she's so arrogant and so convinced of her superiority to the wife and womankind in general, one can't help but want bad things to happen to her.
the wife is ok. a little slow to realize an obvious affair, but at the end she totally destroys any sort of goodwill i'd built for her by doing something totally ludicrous for a man who could not deserve it less. also, for such an astoundingly busy woman, she's awfully scatterbrained. and the business with her ex fiance and her husband being ok with them traveling europe together? um....ok. if you say so.
anyway, this was an easy read and the writer has a good style, so i couldn't go ahead and give it just one star.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful characterizations --, October 15, 2008
This review is from: The Adultery Club (Paperback)
I know you cannot really see me nibbling away at this imaginary plate of crow that's sitting in front of me, but what else can I say? I did sooo NOT want to like this book! I'm not a fan of adultery, and just couldn't imagine a book with the title of The Adultery Club being very readable or enjoyable. Nice cover, though. And that's mostly what reeled me in.
Major kudos, however, to the author Tess Stimson, for creating a plausible plot, three totally dissimilar characters and a world full of insight into character, motivation, want, lust, and most of all--LOVE. There's also a good bit of really blatant, down and dirty sex in here, so if that sort of thing is liable to turn you off, then better you don't read it.
Nicholas Lyon is a 40-ish divorce lawyer in London, happily married for slightly more than ten years to Malinche, now in her mid-to-late 30s, successful author of cookery books and mother of their three daughters, 8, 6 and not quite 2. Sara Kaplan is a 20-something solicitor who joins Nick's lawfirm, on the retirement of one of the partners.
You might think, from this setup, that you know what's going to happen. And it does, but be prepared for fireworks of all sorts, foolishness from all of them, and heart-rending confessions of a multitude of sins, again from all of them, as told to various family and friends.
Stiff upper-lip Brit old-school Nick never, ever thought he would stray from his marriage vows. He saw so much marital wreckage in his work, he thought he was immune. Malinche has never been tempted, either, since their marriage, until her first love comes back into her life. Trace values her as a creative individual in her own right--AND tells her about it, constantly. Sara, very much a bright young thing, knows what she wants and will blaze through anything or anyone who gets in her way. She is self-indulgent beyond the ken of regular people, and really doesn't much care what happens to them, either, until it happens to her.
The author does a fantastic job, in my opinion, with these characters, who are, on the surface so vastly different from each other, yet underneath are all too similar. Actually, when you get right down to it, we all want the same things: We want to be loved (even when we're at our most unloveable) and appreciated, and cared for, and surprised by seemingly trivial little things, but which turn out to be of monstrous proportions.
Each character -- coming from a different generation than the others -- is a product of that generation, with a different outlook on life and love and lust. But underneath, the similarities are profound. Told in first person by each of them, the variance of language and attitude is astonishing. Brilliant!
All the more reason, then, to learn why we should not rush to indulge ourselves in momentary passion, no matter how enticing. Much better we learn to value what we have, before we--oh, so casually--throw it away.
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