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Better Together
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Galant skewers the shallow, striving, McMansion-dwelling suburbanites in this engaging satire. Heather Peters is staring 35 in the face—though "depending on the light, [she could] still pass for a high school cheerleader"; her husband, Kevin, can barely stand her half the time, and her son, Conner, is a complete misfit—but at least they've just landed their dream home in Galapagos Estates, a new development in New Jersey. Galant follows their comic trials and those of two longtime area residents: Agnes, an animal lover and PETA sympathizer, and egg farmer Harlan White, who freelances as a handyman and makes a "fortune off those suckers." Which is how Harlan finds himself smashing the head of an endangered rattlesnake on Heather's back porch... and how Heather gets arrested after Agnes fingers her as the murderer of an endangered species... and how Galapagos Estates becomes the center of a media firestorm. Heather's rise to fame as a "rattlesnake killer" makes a handy metaphor about urban sprawl and the battle of new residents versus old ones, and pokes fun at the oversize egos of slimy developers and yuppies alike. Galant shows a keen knowledge of the real estate turf war and its soldiers in this wincingly funny book—but craft sympathetic characters she does not. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
When Heather Peters, lawyer's wife and mother of a twisted third-grader, snaps up her dream McMansion in rural New Jersey, she doesn't know it's sitting, literally, on a rattlesnake den. But soon a rattler rears its ugly head, Heather's taciturn handyman steps in with a croquet mallet, and the local enviros descend, accusing Heather of killing an endangered species. Next, the press latches on, and, before you know it, the crooked money-grubbing developer behind Heather's nouveau riche castle is sucked into Debra Galant's rollicking suburban morality tale, Rattled.
These deftly drawn characters elicit both winces and laughs. Describing Heather's particular form of disciplined narcissism, Galant writes, "She checked the mirror often, but it wasn't out of vanity. It was more like a breast self-exam." When Heather was in labor with her son, Connor, "she'd reapplied her lipstick between contractions."
Endangered-species crusader Agnes, by contrast, revels in her unreconstructed hippie trappings. "Agnes was listening to All Things Considered on the radio and sorting through the dozens of science experiments in her refrigerator," writes Galant. "But all she could find were jars of mango chutney crusted with mysterious white crystals, putrid containers of month-old soup, olives that looked biblical in provenance."
Formerly a suburban-life columnist for the New York Times, Galant has wisely chosen familiar terrain for her first novel, displaying a mastery for details. Touring the home he's about to purchase in the Galapagos Estates development, Heather's husband notes, "The smaller of the two walk-in closets in the master bedroom was bigger than the room he'd slept in as a boy." Like so many newly well-off professionals, Tom is both thrilled and quietly appalled by his bloated salary and his wife's obsession with acquiring an outsized home.
The Peters' subdivision may be new, but the local grade school exerts the same pressures on its young charges as did schools of yore. When a couple of cool kids approach Connor's misfit table in the cafeteria, "he suddenly felt a change in the molecular structure of the air, indicating that a popular kid was in the vicinity."
Like Tom Perrotta in his marvelous novel of repressed suburban child-rearing, Little Children, Galant captures the particular tyrannies of modern parenting. At the Pine Hills Halloween feast, for instance, "the class moms were expected to lay out a Halloween repast reasonably low in sugar and chocolate, and of course nut-free, while maintaining -- as Principal Gupnick was fond of saying -- the 'festive feel' of the holiday."
Galant skewers everything that's awful about exurbia: striving yuppies blinded by acquisitive mania, greedy developers who bulldoze pristine terrain, strident enviros toiling to protect venomous snakes at all costs. A gumshoe journalist is the only player who doesn't come out smelling rotten. By the time her satisfyingly serpentine story ends, Galant figures out how to give all her characters a measure of what they deserve.
Reviewed by Susan Adams
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
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