Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Comic novels resemble souffles. Each element must be the right temperature and texture for the dish or book to rise. Not an easy task. Sturm und Drang is easier to concoct than frothy comedy.
The usually delightful Elinor Lipman has returned with a new novel, My Latest Grievance, her eighth. As she did in Then She Found Me, The Pursuit of Alice Thrift and The Ladies' Man, among others, Lipman writes with wit and warmth about eccentric families in a New England setting.
Unfortunately, this literary souffle fails to rise. Lipman makes every effort. But the ingredients do not blend together. Though Lipman has been erratic or thin in the past, Grievance is her least successful novel in a long time.
The set-up is not the problem. Opinionated Frederica Hatch is a teenage girl in 1978 who attends Brookline High School outside Boston. Her parents teach at Dewing College, a women's school that ranks several tiers below the Seven Sisters in prestige. Frederica has literally grown up at Dewing.
Her painfully earnest, radical professor parents have always lived in a dorm as house parents, feeding their only adored child at the cafeteria.
As Lipman makes clear, this has been an odd childhood, but few children have had such loving and egalitarian, if distracted, parents.
Frederica has been virtually marinated in attention from staff and students. She is the campus Eloise.
And as all adolescents do, Frederica yearns for parents who are the polar opposite of her own.
Proving yet again that more tears are shed over answered prayers, Lipman gives Frederica a fairy godmother named Laura Lee French.
A childless divorcee in her 40s with a hidden connection to Frederica's parents, French bestows a valuable pearl necklace upon their daughter, which sets the plot in motion.
The glamorous, irresponsible, truth-allergic French enters the quiet confines of Dewing College and the Hatch family. Short-term and long-term chaos ensues: Adultery. Academic scandals. Love children. Family secrets revealed.
Here Grievance falls apart. In other books Lipman has successfully used adoption, adultery and death to move the story along.
But in Grievance, the reader is more jarred than entertained by an attempted suicide, a neurologically disabled woman being overmedicated and a girl left emotionally orphaned and packed off to boarding school.
In looking to tie the novel together, Lipman seems to lose her step, inadvertently lurching from her traditional comic territory into the unfunny world of melodrama.
There are the usual laugh-out-loud descriptions and clever moments, but this was the first Lipman novel I was relieved, not grieved, to close.
My Latest Grievance
By Elinor Lipman
Houghton Mifflin, 244 pp., $24
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
© Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
