Community Reviews
I discovered Laurie Colwin through an in-depth article about her in the Wall Street Journal (June 18, 2021), and was instantly lured by the promise of novels that included humor, wry insights into the human condition, and positivity, something that has gone missing from so many modern novels.
The heroine of this story, Jane Louise, is a (stereotypically) over-anxious Jewish book designer living in Manhattan with her husband, Teddy. They are best friends with an interracial couple, Edie and Mokie, partners in a catering company. Each of the foursome has a complicated family situation, and Jane Louise is trying hard to fit in with the small town community where her mother-in-law, Eleanor, owns a large, rustic home and where she and Teddy go for weekend respites. Like most of Colwin's novels, this one is about characters drawn with insight and humor; it is not a page-turner with rapid plot twists and turns.
I love Colwin's humor and also watching how Jane Louise deals with men at work, one of whom is her boss and who flirts outrageously. When Jane Louise meets with a conceited author to discuss his book design, Colwin writes: “He was very large. His enormous head sat between two immense shoulders. You felt that had he been stripped of flesh, two medium-size women could have played gin rummy in his rib cage. . . . He gave her an appealing look, rather in the direction of her bra.”
Jane Louise and Teddy have their differences as well. She needs a lot of emotional reassurance which Teddy has trouble giving:
"In Jane Louise's experience life was a series of scrambles--to make friends in a new school, to get comfortable in a new town, to scrape together the money to take a trip. She had the deep optimism of a scrapper, but she felt she needed to be told quite often that the roof was not going to cave in.
"Whereas Teddy, who seeemed so able to get through the things of life without scrapping, could not be turned to for reassurance that everything was going to be all right because, in his experience, it often hadn't been."
I enjoyed this book very much and look forward to reading more of Colwin's works. It is such a shame that she suddenly died so young, at only 48.
The heroine of this story, Jane Louise, is a (stereotypically) over-anxious Jewish book designer living in Manhattan with her husband, Teddy. They are best friends with an interracial couple, Edie and Mokie, partners in a catering company. Each of the foursome has a complicated family situation, and Jane Louise is trying hard to fit in with the small town community where her mother-in-law, Eleanor, owns a large, rustic home and where she and Teddy go for weekend respites. Like most of Colwin's novels, this one is about characters drawn with insight and humor; it is not a page-turner with rapid plot twists and turns.
I love Colwin's humor and also watching how Jane Louise deals with men at work, one of whom is her boss and who flirts outrageously. When Jane Louise meets with a conceited author to discuss his book design, Colwin writes: “He was very large. His enormous head sat between two immense shoulders. You felt that had he been stripped of flesh, two medium-size women could have played gin rummy in his rib cage. . . . He gave her an appealing look, rather in the direction of her bra.”
Jane Louise and Teddy have their differences as well. She needs a lot of emotional reassurance which Teddy has trouble giving:
"In Jane Louise's experience life was a series of scrambles--to make friends in a new school, to get comfortable in a new town, to scrape together the money to take a trip. She had the deep optimism of a scrapper, but she felt she needed to be told quite often that the roof was not going to cave in.
"Whereas Teddy, who seeemed so able to get through the things of life without scrapping, could not be turned to for reassurance that everything was going to be all right because, in his experience, it often hadn't been."
I enjoyed this book very much and look forward to reading more of Colwin's works. It is such a shame that she suddenly died so young, at only 48.
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