Peyton Amberg: A Novel (Hardcover)

by Tama Janowitz (Author) "There were a few hotels near the Central Station, but the first one she went to was over three hundred dollars a night, and she..." (more)
Key Phrases: sexy princess, Xian Rong, New York, Tama Janowitz (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Peyton Amberg is a travel agent who really gets around-in more ways than one. In her latest no-holds-barred take on urban malaise, Janowitz (Slaves of New York, etc.) chronicles the international romps of a modern-day Madame Bovary. With her stunning looks ("usually it would be impossible to find a man who, physically, was her equal"), Peyton has no trouble luring men to bed, but under pressure from her manic-depressive mother, she hastily marries an unsuspecting dentist for money and out of fear that no one else will deem her marriageable. Struck with a bout of ennui after her wedding and tired of trying to live up to the expectations of her in-laws, she rushes back to work and almost immediately takes a cheap trip to Brazil, where she meets a debonair German-Italian man, Germano. In the first of many misadventures, Peyton holes up with Germano in her hotel room, where she is wined and dined and otherwise entertained. With her libido unleashed, she finds it next to impossible to return to a normal life in her apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and she pulls further away from her husband and, eventually, her young son. Though she perceives herself as self-sufficient, she becomes more and more addicted to her extramarital hanky panky ("A monkey in the zoo... could not have gone on a wilder bender on a weekend pass from its cage"), finding satisfaction in the beds of gangster Xian Rong in Hong Kong and cowboy Sandy in Vegas. Peyton's overactive id and sense of dissatisfaction seem a bit contrived at times, and her comeuppance rather old-fashioned, but Janowitz's trademark mix of humor and gross-out realism give the novel a queasy charge. Author tour.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Billed as a modern-day Madame Bovary, Janowitz's tenth book traces the rise and eventual ruin of a woman who believes her only resource is her beauty. Bored with her job and desperate to move out of her family's filthy apartment, Peyton marries the first man who asks. She's soon disenchanted with marriage and drifts into a series of infidelities. When her beauty begins to fade, her increasingly desperate need for male attention drives her into situations at first merely humiliating but ultimately degrading and dangerous. Janowitz's eye for the sordid detail is as merciless as ever, and she's in her element describing Peyton's squalid childhood home, her drug-addled and delusional mother, her increasingly dreary succession of affairs, and her nebbishy husband. Ultimately, though, the ferocity of her writing underscores the novel's major flaw: Peyton is so ineffectual and passive, and the supporting characters so uniformly unappealing, that there is little to care about in the story of her downfall. Janowitz built a following with Slaves of New York (1986), one of the defining books of the 1980s, and she also won acclaim for her recent novel A Certain Age (1999). Readers will be interested in her latest. Meredith Parets
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press (October 22, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312318448
• ISBN-13: 978-0312318444
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,638,581 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This powerful book is the Madame Bovary of our time, October 17, 2003

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

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

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Janowitz At Her Best, November 17, 2003

By	Kaylie Jones "kjones5" (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

3.0 out of 5 stars Peyton Amberg, October 25, 2005

By	Alisa Shubb (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Peyton Amberg: A Novel (Paperback)

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.