The Ladies' Man [Hardcover]

Elinor Lipman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 15, 1999

From the bestselling author of The Inn at Lake Devine ("Rivals her own best work for its understanding of the way smart, opinionated people stumble toward happiness"--Glamour) and Isabel's Bed ("It's Fannie Farmer for the soul . . . delivered in a delicious style that is both funny and elegant"--USA Today) comes a darkly romantic comedy of manners that confirms Elinor Lipman's appointment to the Jane Austen chair in modern American sensibility.

Thirty unmarried years have passed since the barely suitable Harvey Nash failed to show up at a grand Boston hotel for his own engagement party. Today, the near-bride, Adele Dobbin, and her two sisters, Lois and Kathleen, blame Harvey for what unkind relatives call their spinsterhood, and what potential beaus might characterize as a leery, united front. The doorbell rings one cold April night. Harvey Nash, older, filled with regrets (sort of), more charming and arousable than ever, just in from the Coast, where he's reinvented himself as Nash Harvey, jingle composer and chronic bachelor, has returned to the scene of his first romantic crime. Despite the sisters' scars and grudges, despite his platinum tongue and roving eye, this old flame becomes an improbable catalyst for the untried and the long overdue.
        
The refined and level-headed Adele finds herself flirting with her boss--on public television. Entrepreneurial Kathleen is suddenly drinking cappuccino with Lorenz, the handsome doorman at the luxury high-rise where she owns a lingerie boutique. And Lois, the only sister to have embarked on the road to matrimony and, subsequently, divorce, revives her long-cherished notion that Harvey abandoned Adele rather than indulge his preference for another Dobbin.
        
Both comic and compassionate, The Ladies' Man has all of Lipman's trademark wit, wattage, and      social mischief--with an extra bite.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Soon after Nash Harvey, incurable womanizer and failing jingle composer, arrives at the Boston home of the Dobbin sisters, he is struck with a casserole dish. This isn't all that surprising, considering that Nash, onetime fiancé of Adele Dobbin, disappeared on the night of their engagement party, 30 years ago. Fresh from a failed romance with a Californian reflexologist, Nash brings chaos to the three sisters, all of whom has done the best to settle into spinsterhood. Unintentionally, he leads everyone he meets to a truer knowledge of him- or herself, and the possibilities of a brighter future. Five distinct but masterfully interwoven tales of the heart spin around the central, hilariously desperate mission of Nash, a man seeking to escape the inescapable.

Lipman writes with the wry authority of a latter-day Jane Austen or Henry James. Her work ripples with startling segues into the perversities of male-female relationships. Yet for all this insight, her characters are drawn with companionable warmth. This is not a book about the bold and the beautiful. Her cast inhabits a twilight of TV dinners, graying hair, and disastrous dates, yet they never lose their hope or their capacity for love. A gourmet casserole of a book--drama, humor, and understanding in equally generous portions. --Matthew Baylis

From Publishers Weekly

The Dobbin sisters are not the Bennetts, and Harvey Nash is no Mr. Darcy, but Lipman's latest novel is Pride and Prejudice as it plays out in the bicoastal, aging-boomer '90s. The protagonistsAthree red-haired siblings and the man who dumped one of them at her 1967 engagement partyAare all in their 40s and 50s. Almost chaste and largely celibate, the Dobbins live together spinsterishly in a Boston suburb, until the womanizing cad who now calls himself Nash Harvey flies in from L.A. "on a mission... to apologize." Unforgiving Adele, the oldest and the one he dumped, works stoically in public TVAin marked contrast to Harvey's precarious livelihood writing commercial jingles. Difficult middle sister Lois, divorced from a cross-dressing patent attorney, for decades has believedAmistakenlyAthat the smoothly smarmy Harvey left town because of his feelings for her. She welcomes him back with barely concealed lust. The youngest, Kathleen, reacts angrily to his predatory insinuations, breaking a casserole dish on his head and inadvertently turning Nash into an unwelcome houseguest. Paths cross in sitcom fashion, especially since Cynthia John, Harvey's pickup on the red-eye from L.A., lives in the building that houses Kathleen's lingerie shop. The situation is provocative and promising, and at first Lipman seems poised to deliver a semiwhimsical search for identity ? la Ann Tyler. She exhibits a gimlet eye for the nuances of social interaction and for the rituals of courtship both East and West Coast style, and as usual, her view of the battle of the sexes is frank and refreshing. But the narrative soon begins to read like the outline of a screenplay. Done in shots and heavy on (admittedly snappy) dialogue, it sacrifices depth of character and story for glib entertainment. Though certain scenes (Adele's perfunctory deflowering; the car crash in which Harvey's ex meets a New York playwright on the make) are witty and engaging, too many other encounters (Harvey's sojourn in the Dobbins' apartment; a cocktail party/jingle recital) are dictated less by credibility than by the need to be cute. It's satisfying that while Harvey faces his comeuppance and a palimony suit, the Dobbin sisters finally confront love and commitment. In the end, however, this book is more superficial than we have come to expect of Lipman's fiction. BOMC selection; film rights to Paramount. (June) FYI: The Inn at Lake Devine will be released in trade paperback by Vintage in May.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 260 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (June 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679456945
• ISBN-13: 978-0679456940
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (52 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #444,541 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Elinor Lipman started writing fiction by night while working at a teachers' magazine by day. Her first book, INTO LOVE AND OUT AGAIN, was published in 1987; its centerpiece was seven connected stories, novella-length, which gave her the courage to try a novel. THEN SHE FOUND ME came out in 1990 (18 years later it was adapted into a feature film), followed by THE WAY MEN ACT, ISABEL'S BED, THE INN AT LAKE DEVINE, THE LADIES' MAN, THE DEARLY DEPARTED, THE PURSUIT OF ALICE THRIFT, MY LATEST GRIEVANCE and most recently, THE FAMILY MAN. Her honors include the New England Book Award and The Poetry Center's Fiction Prize. She divides her time between leafy western Massachusetts and New York City, and tries to write 500 words per day no matter the location. She and her husband have one son, who lives in Los Angeles and explains the movie business to his mother as needed. She knits, follows politics, cooks, and walks, but not enthusiastically.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Ladies' Man, Looking at Some of Life's Regrets!, July 16, 2000

By 

Frank J. Foley - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ladies' Man (Paperback)

I am an Elinoir Lipman fan. I enjoyed this book, especially the end. All of the sister's had to take a hard look at themselves. They had bought into their parent's world and the ideas and standards of that time, and it was this world that prevented them from living their lives to the fullest. How many of us reach fifty and realize we have been living someone else's version of what life is and not our own. Nash Harvey is the man many a female has run into in a vunerable moment. We want to believe it is love and that last chance for it only to have our dreams smashed back to reality after we have been taken for the fool. I found this to be enjoyable summer reading with more meat to the story and character development then other books designated as women's summer reading. I became engrossed in the lives of the characters and the story held my attention. I would recommend this to women to read. it addresses a vulnerable side of the female sex that they don't always want to show. It speaks of the relationships among sisters and the need for friends to sustain us through the hard times and laugh with us.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sassy, Classy and Fun!, September 7, 2000

By 

Marion "[e-mail]" (Louisiana) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Ladies' Man (Paperback)

I loved the Dobbin sisters and their quirky attitudes toward life. That they're all still sharing an apartment together 30 years after Harvey Nash (now Nash Harvey)dumped oldest sister, Adele, on the evening of their engagement is perfect irony. From their setting up empty glass bottles inside their apartment door as an inexpensive burglar alarm to the surprising love lives of each of them, you can't help but fall in love with this unusual family. Nash Harvey is the character you love to hate, who picks up women at the drop of a hat, and has never once committed to anything but his reflection in the mirror. He tries his charms on each of the sisters and the results are hilarious. Great book and wonderful, sassy characters!!!!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A fun, light farce, April 25, 2000

By 

Cathy A Belben - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ladies' Man (Paperback)

Once again, Elinor Lipman has created a funny, light story about women--in this case, three sisters whose lives are disrupted when the ex-fiance returns thirty years after abandoning Adele, the eldest. Lipman has created a thoroughly believable--and detestable--anti-hero in Nash Harvey/Harvey Nash, a rogue who sponges off women and never seems to understand that he is not nearly as charming as he thinks he is. Readers who enjoy peering into the private lives of mature women will appreciate the sisters' struggles to deal with Nash and with their own middle-of-life romances and lack thereof. Real, fully developed characters and a speedy plot make this a read-in-a-sitting romantic comedy.