Amazon.com Review
The setup for Suzanne Berne's second novel sounds positively gothic: Mirella (a lawyer) and Howard (an architect) desperately need a nanny to care for their two small children. Without carefully checking her references, they welcome the cozy-seeming Randi into their creaky Colonial saltbox. At first the arrangement does seem perfect: Randi cooks, cleans, and works wonders with the heretofore recalcitrant children. But slowly it becomes clear that her sunny, reliable temperament might be cloaking a darker past. In elegant, sometimes quite funny prose, Berne cleverly readies the reader for domestic atrocities in the gruesome tradition of
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Then she subverts our expectations by showing that Mirella and Howard have their secrets, too--quiet compromises they've made to achieve their ideal home. The reader keeps waiting for the nanny horror show to begin, and meanwhile Berne shows a family falling apart under the pressure of trying to appear perfect. "Disaster could be small and dull and corrosive," she writes. "It might already have come."
To up the ante, Berne has installed her domestic ménage in a charming New England town, where main street is populated by quaint shops, and unsightly necessities (such as, say, the grocery store) are relegated to the hinterlands. Inhabiting the equivalent of a Norman Rockwell painting, each character is further pressed to idealize the notion of family; each has a distinctive mental image of what a home should look like. Anger and frustration and failure are suppressed until they surface in horrible, comic eruptions. Thus do Berne's characters ultimately learn to appreciate the "terrible, desirable, exhausting plenitude" of life. Admirers of Joanna Trollope's domestic dramas--by turns witty and harrowing--should find much to love in A Perfect Arrangement. --Claire Dederer
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Quotidian details of an apparently perfect domestic life spell suspense in Berne's second novel (after A Crime in the Neighborhood), set in the small New England town of New Aylesbury. Mirella Cook-Goldman works for a Boston law firm; her husband, Howard, is an architect who works at home. Their two young children, five-year-old Pearl and toddler Jacob, mill about their lovely colonial house. But this pleasant surface shows cracks: Pearl is temperamental and Jacob developmentally slow; Mirella and Howard talk past one another he resents her long work hours, and she feels distanced from her family. Both are harboring major secrets. Their new nanny, Randi, is young and energetic she cooks, cleans and devises games for the children. In theory, Mirella and Howard should have more time to spend with each other, but it soon becomes evident that their problems run deeper than lack of intimacy. Things further disintegrate when Mirella and Howard realize that hyperefficient Randi might be too possessive and not quite what she seems. Berne is an assured writer and is at her best with careful, observant descriptions of family life. The novel is less successful at providing an emotional center the characters often seem like studiously drawn archetypes and the jacked-up dramatic scenes toward the end are forced. But a sense of the fragility and also resilience of our everyday existence lingers after the final page. Agent, Colleen Mohyde. (May 25)Forecast: Berne's first novel won the Orange Prize in the U.K., was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times and the Edgar Allan Poe first fiction awards all of which will promote name recognition. Selling to fans of Sue Miller and Alice Hoffman should help build sales.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
