Living on Air [Hardcover]

Anna Shapiro (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2006

“Finely attuned to the self-consciousness and vulnerability of adolescence, and the slippery elision of money and sophistication.”—The New Yorker

“Dazzling. . . . A piercing joy.”—Newsday

In 1966, longing to escape Levittown and her self-absorbed artist father, fourteen-year-old Maude secures a scholarship to a prestigious prep school. As family tensions surface, she struggles to find a morally acceptable place in the worlds of high art and social privilege.

Anna Shapiro is the author of two previous novels, The Right Bitch and Life and Love, Such as They Are, and a collection of essays, A Feast of Words.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Maude Pugh is born and bred in 1960s suburban Long Island, in a "houseful of failures, each feeling terrible and trying to make the next one feel worse." Her domineering, self-involved father, Milt, is a struggling artist who paints every room in their house black as a dramatic backdrop to his brightly colored modernist canvases. Maude's mother, Nina, is defensive with the rich neighbors she fears are her social superiors and resentful of her daughter for outshining Maude's disaffected older brother, Seth, who flees home at 16. Although Maude, whom Shapiro tracks through her teen years, aspires to be an artist in her own right, she also lusts after the good life exemplified by Milt's upscale art students, matrons swathed in expensive silk scarves "as intricately patterned as illuminated manuscripts." So Maude secures a short-lived scholarship to Bay Farm, a pricey prep school where she befriends Weesie, a child of privilege who thinks poverty is romantic, and gives her heart to Danny, who eventually betrays her. Shapiro (The Right Bitch) is a shrewd anthropologist well versed in the cultures of adolescence, the '60s and class strife, but she sometimes falters in her psychological portraiture, waxing precious and self-conscious rather than astute. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

Growing up in nineteen-sixties Levittown, a precocious fourteen-year-old shrinks from the "urchins of plumbers" who share her prefab suburb, disdain her weekly trips to the library, and call her Volkswagen-driving parents "Communists." Preternaturally sensitive to class differences, she secretly applies to the preppie Bay Farm School, where she lurks on the fringes of "bright, cosseted teenagers" whose pedigreed fathers "didn't bother having jobs." There's a fairy-tale quality to this story of a poor girl, nose pressed to the windowpane, obsessively cataloguing the habits of that mysterious tribe the rich—their carelessly worn Pucci nightgowns, their clambakes in Maine. Shapiro, in her third novel, is finely attuned to the self-consciousness and vulnerability of adolescence, and the slippery elision of money and sophistication.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Soho Press; First edition (May 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1569474311
• ISBN-13: 978-1569474310
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,829,438 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars deep character study, May 28, 2006

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Living on Air (Hardcover)

Maude Pugh was raised in Levittown, Long Island. By the time she attended high school she concluded her parents were colossal failures who hid in a community in which all exterior houses were identical to one another. This she realizes enables them to act eccentric inside their home, but provide a veneer of respectability belonging outside.

Her father, the artist Milt, has a fan club of one, himself. To better display his colorful work, every room in the house is painted black as night to provide the proper background. Her mother Nina feels inferior to everyone, the wealthier upscale neighbors, her spouse and even Maude. Her older brother Seth is a classic loser who fits right at home with the family of failures that reside in the Pugh residence; that explains why he ran way when he turned sixteen. Still Maude has dreams of truly making it in the art world; they seem to be occurring when she wins a scholarship to the prestigious Bay Farm prep school, but she only finds conformance and betrayal there even as her peers salivate over her being a bohemian artist's daughter; just like at home.

This is an interesting look at social class and family politics through the eyes of an acute teen who knows her parents and sibling are losers in life yet they are the reason she is part of the in crowd. Maude is a fascinating protagonist who wants desperately to break the cycle, but hits glass ceilings from so-called friends especially a boyfriend. Fans of deep character studies inside the dynamics of a family drama will enjoy Maude's at times maudlin tale.

Harriet Klausner

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Aaaaah - happy ending!, February 19, 2008

By 

Eileen Macdougall "cootmom" (Wilmington, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Living on Air (Paperback)

I liked the book but I LOVED the ending! The main character, Maud, was truly deserving of the pleasures granted her in the final pages by the author. Most of the fiction I've read lately has resolutions which slowly dissolve to a melted-puddle-of-how-do-I-get-out-of-this, like that pesky ice on the front stairs in February. Not this one!