New fiction: Lauren Grodstein’s A Friend of the Family

grodsteinOn a quick, non-travel-related note, I want to announce that my Paris Writing Workshop colleague Lauren Grodstein has just published a new novel, A Friend of the Family. It’s been getting nice reviews in venues like the New York Times and USA Today — and I can personally attest that it’s an engrossing read.

If you like fiction, it’s definitely worth checking out. The best summary I’ve seen of the book comes from The Daily Beast, which calls it “a gripping, elegant account of fatherly love and suburban sanctity gone awry” and describes it thus:

In this American Beauty-esque tale of love and tragedy in suburbia, Lauren Grodstein charts the missteps and redemption of a small family whose suburban sanctity is threatened in unexpected ways. Pete is an accomplished middle-class doctor and father whose life is a liberal, pre-packaged version of success, complete with a lucrative medical practice, loving wife and son, and a nice house in New Jersey—a life O: The Oprah Magazine calls “a persuasive indictment of a certain kind of privileged narrow-mindedness…” Things go awry when Peter’s son Alec drops out of his liberal arts college and becomes enamored with Laura, a spellbinding older woman whose unspeakable past threatens his future. The course of the entire family’s life changes as a result of the relationship and the threat Peter believes Laura poses, and Pete is forced to put his fatherly love to unimagined tests. “What Grodstein captures so strikingly is the anxiety of a father’s love, that aching affection that can flip in a moment of panicked disappointment to full-blown disgust,” writes The Washington Post. The Daily Beast featured A Friend of the Family in its gallery of the best books of fall.

Posted by | Comments Off on New fiction: Lauren Grodstein’s A Friend of the Family  | November 22, 2009
Category: Travel Writing

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