Amazon.com Review
Lynne Sharon Schwartz prefaces her urban comedy with this bit of wisdom: "The true narrative form of our time is the sitcom."
In the Family Way, Schwartz's personal
Three's Company, is populated by an extended Manhattan family who dwell in an Upper West Side apartment building like bees in a hive. Their queen is, appropriately enough, Bea, a wild-haired, warm-hearted, middle-aged caterer who once was married to Roy, a therapist. Roy, however, left her for cool Serena, who in turn left Roy for Bea's sister May. Now all live under the same roof, along with several of their children and Roy's third wife, Lisa, who is the math teacher of Roy and Bea's daughter Sara--who, incidentally, prefers to be called Shimmer. Bea is having an affair with the super, Dmitri, a Russian given to poetic flights which come thudding to earth when he misremembers his thesaurus. (He whispers ardently to her, "My love. My wild orchid. My landscape with the secret bog.") Meanwhile, Bea's mother, the landlady, is busily trying to lure Oscar, the doorman, into bed. Three of the tribe become pregnant, yielding a climactic three-babies-in-one-night set piece that caps a novel crowded with delightfully implausible coincidence.
Anyone familiar with Schwartz's exquisite Disturbances in the Field--unaccountably out of print--knows her to be a serious and ambitious novelist. So what's she doing in Full House territory? Writing a damned entertaining novel, that's what, and using comic form to comment caustically on the way we live now. Roy, for instance, tells himself, "as he often told his patients: Not all guilt is something you want to get rid of. Some guilt is justified--if, that is, you choose to inhabit a moral universe." Bea and her family earnestly want to live in a moral universe, but don't quite, and their ambivalence and guilt give Schwartz's frolic a sour, pungent undercurrent. It's the taste of reality's failures, and it turns out to be what sitcoms have been missing all along. --Claire Dederer
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Schwartz breaks out of type in this hilarious chronicle of the lives and loves of an unusual "extended family" on New York's Upper West Side. The narrative takes on the flavor of a Woody Allen film or an intelligent sitcom as it exposes the unsettled morals and mores of sophisticated, liberal urbanites. Roy, a good-natured and hedonistic middle-aged psychotherapist, and his ex-wife Bea, a caterer who helps run the building her mother owns near Central Park West, head a formidable cast of characters who, while "all seeking happiness, naturally," occasionally transgress such social conventions as monogamy. Bea, who believes that "keeping the family together is more important than sexual jealousy," accepts almost any configuration brought about by the fulfillment of desire, as long as the parties involved remain close to her, preferably in apartments within her building. The relatives and lovers in Bea's circle include Roy's second wife, Serena, who becomes the lesbian lover of Bea's artist sister, May; youthful Lisa, Roy's third wife; Dmitri, an expatriate Russian who is Bea's lover and the building's superintendent; Bea's mother, Anna, a slightly senile but still randy widow; and Bea and Roy's four children (two from Roy's wartime liaison with a Vietnamese prostitute) and their romantic interests. Schwartz (Ruined by Reading; Leaving Brooklyn) masterfully orchestrates, providing enough outrageous situations and ironic twists to keep the reader chuckling appreciatively throughout. Roy, for instance, agrees to impregnate ex-wife Serena so that she and May can raise a child. Finally, Roy must ask himself whether he is at the center of his own cherished "harem," or whether he is just a link in the growing network of women and mothers surrounding him, the most powerful and taxed of whom is Bea, trying "to hold back entropy single-handed." Agent, Peter Matson. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
