Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (Paperback)

Lorna Landvik has created unforgettable characters, strong women who discover amazing things about themselves as they adapt to changing times and changing lives. I heartily recommend this most enjoyable book and only wish my own neighborhood had a chapter of Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons.

Narrated in turn by each of the five, while the other four weave in and out of each chapter, AHEB covers 30 years' worth of book club meetings, and incidentally, their raising their children to adulthood. Each woman has traits to admire and to recoil from; most of us will identify with at least one of them. Motherly Kari (who has no child), Confident Audrey (sex on the brain, all the time), Terrified Merit (the beauty without power who rebels quietly), Indomitable Slip (small but powerful), Secretive Faith (whose casual lies keep all from knowing who she really is). Typical readers of the genre will find at least one to identify with and use the others as foils. We get to know all of them well enough to care.

It's not the emptiness of "chick lit" but it's not canonical either; this is 99.44% pure middlebrow. The housewives are upper-middle-class moms who are affected by cultural changes despite their priveleged place; by the early nineties all of them have returned to work. Some of the book is overly formulaic; by setting each chapter as a book club meeting, the author clearly used best-seller lists through the last 30 years. Would such a book club always be ahead, or even on, that curve? The sixties and early seventies seem more accurately researched and presented than the later seventies through early nineties; there was little sense of emotional presence or changed times in those chapters. Think about all the little things we can't live without now that weren't there in 1985, like drive-through espresso or cell phones or the Internet (which earns a very brief mention at the end); it's hard to tell 1978 from 1998 in this book other than the kids getting older.

This novel is reminiscent of similar group histories such as How to Make an American Quilt by way of Marilyn French's The Women's Room. While it is unfair to characterize the women of AHEB as merely a book club (since they all live on the same street, they are a community first and foremost), using literature as history is an interesting device. The little snips of each woman's lives around the monthly meetings are taken in like a box of bon-bons: sweet, enjoyable, yet too much of it may not be that good for you. by Maddi Hausmann Sojourner, 15 July 2004

- Point of View (POV): There are six POVs in this book, some in first and some in third. The author isn't consistent in POVs throughout a chapter, and the jumps to other characters can be difficult to follow.
- Plot: Every plot line except the kitchen sink is thrown into this novel. Issues include spousal abuse, alcoholism, drug use, race relations, war, peace protests, car accidents, adultery, infertility, homosexuality, AIDS, and cancer. A crisis arises, it's dealt with, and the story moves on to another crisis. The author could have trimmed the scope and characters and focused more on a smaller list of issues.
- Slip: Slip was the most annoying character. The woman never met a rally she couldn't protest or a gathering she couldn't crash. Her political preaching was over the top. Standing up for the proletariat? Wouldn't the failure of socialism in the USSR, North Korea, Cuba, in fact every country it's been attempted, encourage the author to leave this plot line out of the novel? I nearly put the book down several times because all Republicans were portrayed as uptight and bad, and all Democrats (of course, all the characters are Democrats) were fun and good.
- Vietnam: The recycling of the psychologically-damaged Vietnam veteran was also irritating. Does Ms. Landvik know any men who actually served in Vietnam? I know several, including a medic who saw truly horrific fights and wounds, and all these men lead normal lives. All war leaves scars, both mental and physical, but most Vietnam veterans didn't come home and drift through life, lost. Every vet in this novel is a basketcase, unable to function in life.

I enjoyed parts of the story, but I wouldn't consider it a great book. There are more enjoyable books that deal with women's issues without throwing in EVERY problem. I recommend Fried Green Tomatoes.