Product Description

Adam Weller is a moderately successful novelist, past his prime, but squiring around a much younger woman and still longing for greater fame and glory. His former wife, Eleanor, is unhappily playing the role of theoverweight, discarded woman. Their daughter Maud has just begun a frankly sexual affair that unexpectedly becomes life-changing. Into each of these lives the past intrudes in a way that will test them to their core. With perfect pitch and a rare empathy, Brian Morton is equally adept at portraying the life of the mind and how it plays out in the world, brilliantlytracing the border between honor and violation. Here Morton tells his strongest story yeta story about love, friendship, literary treachery, and what each of us owes to the past.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1065093 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

From Publishers Weekly
While the story of two broken couples—one by infidelity, one by tragedy—contains a number of maudlin moments, this polished novel's touchy-feely title belies the trenchant humor of its take on contemporary New York, especially its literary scene. Adam Weller—one of the more engaging scoundrels in recent fiction—is an aging, semirenowned novelist whose star is on the wane. Petty, egocentric and devious, he has left his wife, Eleanor, for a beautiful, ambitious younger woman, Thea. Through a series of improbable events, he acquires a late rival's long-lost, unpublished manuscript, a masterpiece which he appropriates and sells as his own, in hopes of reviving his flagging career. Eleanor, an Upper West Side therapist, struggles to recover from their breakup, even as an old college sweetheart tries to reconnect with her. Meanwhile, their daughter, Maud, a philosophy grad student with a history of depression, enters into an unlikely but intense affair with Samir, a man haunted by the death of his young daughter from a previous marriage. The interwoven plots proceed briskly toward what could be a spectacularly melodramatic climax, but despite occasional contrivances, Morton (Starting Out in the Evening) brings the novel to a quietly moving conclusion. (Sept.)
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From Booklist
Like Cheryl Mendelson in her Morningside Heights novels, Morton writes with fluid grace and keen detail about lifelong New Yorkers in the grip of shifting family dynamics. Adam Weller, an aging reprobate who has left his wife for his ambitious young mistress, sees a chance to revivify his literary career when an old friend dies, leaving behind the unpublished manuscript of his masterpiece. He calculatedly decides to publish the book as his own after weighing his chances for acclaim against the possibility of being found out. Meanwhile, his bitter ex-wife, feeling ashamed of her weight and her circumstances, decides to reconnect with an old flame and to take up the writing she abandoned upon becoming a mother. Their ethereal daughter, Maud, completely absorbed by her philosophy studies, enters into a sudden, deeply sexual relationship with a reticent Arab American haunted by tragedy. As the three members of this family navigate their changing circumstances, Morton (A Window across the River, 2003) poignantly speaks to the notion of loyalty--to the past and to one's sense of self. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

New Yorker
"Inside his broad comedy of manners is a heartfelt novel about the redemptive power of suffering."