Customer Reviews

Peyton Amberg: A Novel

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I think Tama Janowitz is one of the most important female writers of our generation and I become offended at the moral idiocy of certain reviewers, who seem incapable of grasping the finer nuances and humor of Janowitz's style. Just as "A Certain Age" describes a modern-day Lilly Bart to perfection, "Peyton Amberg" does the same for Emma Bovary. Janowitz experienced enormous success with both press and readership at a young age, which seems to incite people to attack her later work. Ridiculous. Her work keeps improving.

Tama Janowitz burst onto the literary scene in the 1980s with the publication of her bestselling story collection SLAVES OF NEW YORK, which deftly chronicled the insecurities and eccentricities of a colorful menagerie of city dwelling singles. Her subsequent books have been similar send-ups of Manhattan life, but with PEYTON AMBERG, Janowitz charts a new course as she turns her acerbic eye on married life and its malcontents.

PEYTON AMBERG is the MADAME BOVARY of our time: a modern-day domestic drama of longing, regret, resentment, and dreams unfulfilled. Similar to the infamously restless Emma Bovary, the title character in this novel is a deeply unhappy woman who revolts against the confines of her married life and its middle-class trappings through a series of adulterous affairs. It is only through these illicit liaisons that she is able to feel alive, whole and in control of her destiny. Peyton is in perpetual pursuit of an elusive and fleeting happiness, convinced that each sexual encounter is going to be the key to her salvation --- the thing that will fill the void.

Born on the wrong side of the tracks into a dysfunctional family, she had learned early on that her beauty was her only ticket out of a life of poverty. Desperate to escape this dreary blue-collar destiny, Peyton married young to an ambitious but boorish dental student. While at first she couldn't believe her good fortune in securing a loving husband and comfortable middle class future, she quickly grows restless and disillusioned by the marriage that she thought would be her deliverance. Her new life as a middle-class housewife suddenly feels provincial, her new husband tiresome, and she is overcome with resentment and regret that she could have done better.

She returns to her job as a travel agent, which provides some respite from reality by giving her the opportunity to travel on junkets to exotic locales. Her corruption begins innocently enough on a solo trip to Brazil when her wallet is stolen and she is befriended and seduced by a rich and handsome older man. After returning home, the staidness of her life and marriage pales in comparison to the excitement of the affair, and thus, like a junkie craving the next high, Peyton embarks on a series of sordid liaisons in an effort to stave off her gnawing discontent.

While these dalliances allow her to briefly escape herself, each encounter leaves her emptier and more unfulfilled than before. A downward spiral of shame and degradation ensues until, in the end, she is left with nothing. Her youth and beauty have evaporated and she is rendered completely pathetic and devoid of humanity. Alone in a seamy Belgium hotel room, she realizes too late that what she had might not have been so bad after all.

While Peyton's dissatisfaction with her station in life and her desire for better is perhaps a universal human condition, we are unable to feel sympathy because of her remorseless and self-indulgent actions. Her unwillingness to accept and appreciate the realities of her life ensures that her moral corruption is inevitable. The theme of destiny vs. free will is continually played out in this novel. While Peyton makes choices that lead to her downfall, she is also a victim of circumstances. The constraints of her upbringing, including lack of money and education, gave her limited options from the beginning.

But whatever disadvantages she may have had, there is little to make one pity the numb, one-dimensionally drawn character of Peyton Amberg. Her vast disappointment with life and her feelings of futility and powerlessness are echoed by the novel's airless and nihilistic atmosphere wherein time seems to stand still. This effect is created in part by the unusual and disjointed narrative technique that tells the story from the future moving backwards, interspersing slices of Peyton's married life with vignettes of her liaisons. The story ends where it began, some twenty years into the future. While this is a powerful morality tale and work of social commentary with strong echoes of MADAME BOVARY, its relentlessly downbeat nihilism and lack of a redemptive outcome may ultimately turn off readers.

--- Reviewed by Joni Rendon

Hi - I bought this book some time ago and think I will have to get it again because it was so good. What a jarring story! I am not much of a fiction reader, but Tama Janowitz did such a great job that it sure felt like a true story to me. This would make a great movie and although I was compelled to read Tama's other books, this one is definitely the best.

Picked this book up and enjoyed the verbal foreplay in the first chapter. The strong writing continued at times, but ultimately, the randy Mrs. Amberg has her makeup smeared and runs badly out of steam.

Falls in that category of book where a reader asks: would this book be published except for 1. author lives in NY; 2. her friends reviewed it; 3. surprise--plot is about a desperate housewife in NY, sex, and the accompanying blah blah blah. Not sure if I cared any longer by the end, which didn't some soon enough.

Bleak is how I would describe this novel. For the first 50 or so pages I thought I would simply put it down unfinished, but with some persistance the central character - the eponymous Peyton Amberg - began to grow on me and I started to find her somewhat interesting in a, well, bleak-but-interesting sort of way. Then, just when I thought the novel was going to go somewhere potentially fascinating, the writer throws a far-fetched coincidence of a plot twist at me and the story just ends.
The central themes of the novel have to do with the vagaries of sex, love & aging, and maybe what we are meant to realise is that old truism "you cannot love someone until you love yourself" (Peyton Amberg clearly has no love for herself). Or maybe the novel is meant to be simply, bleak.
I had hoped from the reviews of Ms. Janowitz as an author that the book would have an element of dark humor. The funniest part is the dedication. I have not read other works by Tama Janowitz and this may not have been the best work to start with, but I'll take a pass on reading more.

This is the story of a silly, aging woman consumed with the desire to look young. There is no depth, no nuance, no humanity in the character, so we cannot care what happens to her. I see no similarity to 'Madame Bovary' which is a complex, many layered portrait: this book is paper-thin, ugly, mean-spirited, and ultimately pointless.
One is embarrassed for the human race while reading it.
Basically: yuck.

This book sounded very promising. Peyon Amberg is a woman without direction, trying to find it. Her mother is mentally ill, her brother in and out of rehab and prison. She marries, Barry, a dentist although she doesn't really love, and gets bored. She goes through the passages or life, married, has a baby, travels. This novel tells of her extra marital affairs. Which even those are boring. I read the whole book waiting for it to get better, it never did. But I would give Janowitz another chance and check out on of her other books, but from a library.

In this book, Tama Janowitz expresses her own intense jealousy and hatred of women in general. She forgets that the sexual revolution is over and women don't need a man to take care of them. She hates any women that are married, single, poor or middle class. Which is 99% of women anywhere.
She writes a story about a women who is misled into trying to conform to society's stupid "rules" for women, and when she does not conform is led to misery and shame. Her message to young women is awful: Women are worthless without a man. Why do all her female characters lack self-esteem? Only a women that hated other women could write a book like this. Misogyny is thinly disguised as nihlism.