The Best of the Backlist: Elinor Lipman
The Best of the Backlist
A look at worthy authors you may not know, focusing on their entire collection of in-stock backlist titles. The backlist is a great way to meet some new authors and get a sense of their work.
Elinor Lipman
Elinor Lipman’s novels are smooth, satirical, urbane, and full of Austen-like witty and acerbic characters from the 21st century. You will hardly believe you haven’t discovered Elinor Lipman and her amazing cast of parents, siblings, ex-spouses, family pets, and quirky friends. Lipman’s dialogue is sharp and often hilarious; each interchange moves the story along but never to the point where the reader feels hurried as though something is missing. Stories unfold carefully and with a great deal of charm and wit, and you really do feel as though you are in the midst of the conversations, able to hear the nuances of tone as well as the rattling of the ice in the G & Ts.
Lipman’s latest book, currently out in hardback, is The Family Man. Set in Manhattan, it is filled with what you might expect in Manhattan: the impossibility of finding an affordable apartment, stepsons seeking to steal their stepmom’s fortune, a struggling actress, a Jewish mother, and regular trips to Zabar’s for bagels. The gay ex-stepfather of a lovely woman “finds” her after having lost contact for 25 years (with mom/ex-wife not in on the secret) and father and daughter set out to learn about each other as adults and figure out the whole father-daughter thing. In doing so, it turns out that they actually like each other after all, and are rather united in their dislike for several other people, all of whom seem to make life more complicated for apparently no good reason.
The Latest Grievance gives us overeducated 60s-loving liberal parents raising their daughter on a college campus (they just never left). The problem is, it’s not the 60s anymore and Fredericka, the daughter, really isn’t interested in recreating them with her parents—until she meets a strange and exotic woman who was part of her parents’ 60s-life…as her dad’s ex-wife! Fredericka in an earlier life could have appeared in The Inn at Lake Devine as Natalie, a young (to start) Jewish protagonist who just can’t figure out why the Inn at Lake Devine is, during the 1960s, really only for Gentiles. Her hilarious attempts at infiltration of the summer camp are ultimately successful, but it is her eventual return to the camp as an adult (for a chi-chi and very goyim wedding) when she really learns why Jews and Gentiles don’t summer together.
In The Pursuit of Alice Thrift a rather unlikable (prickly, sharp, and totally unwilling to suffer fools) physician with no social skills finally meets a man…not the one, certainly, that her tolerant friends would choose for her. He’s got nothing going for him (no style, no grace, no “people”) so surely Alice can do better, can’t she? Or can she? The Way Men Act previews the scene in Alice Thrift: a now-social misfit (but once darling and exotic Manhattanite) slinks home to MA after a devastating lost love, only to find her only employment opportunities include designing bouquets for the weddings of all the girls she left behind in her hometown. Why (or rather, why not?) me?
Imagine being a somewhat anile milquetoast, enjoying your quiet life, only to have the mother who gave you up years ago—the decidedly unquiet and very public and definitely over the top mother—descend upon you and your life to meet you and bond with you and put right what was once torn by a decision made in youth. The movie version followed this terrific novel: Then She Found Me. The same over-the-top and larger-than-life woman prevails in Isabel’s Bed, where Isabel (the diva) gets to share the details of her life with her biographer, Harriet, who has definitely not had the same sorts of adventures and the same level of fun. In both, the question becomes who has had the better life, the one left behind or the one who sprung ahead? The Dearly Departed gives us more parents misbehaving—and more daughters trying to avoid parental misbehavior at all costs. It’s only when Sunny finds out from a stranger (whose looks are suspiciously familiar) that her mother has died, and how her mother has died (in the arms of a strange man who looks suspiciously like the stranger who told Sunny…you get the picture) that Sunny comes to terms with things that all the odd persons in her small NH town seem to know already.
Finally, or perhaps first, Lipman’s set of short stories and her first major publishing effort is Into Love and Out Again. Any Lipman reading—short story or novel—is sure to please.
