by Tom Perrotta
Perrotta's sly sense of suburbia as a place where things can go woefully off-kilter is probably best known from the Reese Witherspoon film of his high school satire Election. His fourth novel gets just as many laughs charting a course through the "whip-cracking fascist glee" of perfect moms—and the playgroups they organize—in a middle-class town. Among the cast are Todd, a former high school jock who would rather play football than study for the bar exam his wife is pushing him to take, Sarah, a less-than-perfect mother who is bored hanging out at the playground with her toddler, and Ronnie, a convicted child molester who may or may not deserve a break from his hostile neighbors. Many characters are frustrated, fearing they have fallen "in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they'd actually made some sort of choice."
The cast is so real that book groups will have a blast comparing people they know to the ones in the book. And Perrotta is the rare writer equally gifted at drawing people's emotional maps—Sarah and Todd have a sweet affair—and creating sidesplitting scenes like the one where a group of surly accountants plays a crushing game of football. Suburban comedies don't come any sharper.
NOVEL
by Rachel Cusk
"I had a private distrust of the stability of everyday things," confides a woman who could be speaking for nearly all the characters in these interlocking domestic dramas. Set in present-day England and pegged as a novel, The Lucky Ones functions more as a collection of stories with characters crossing paths in large and small ways, à la movies such as Magnolia. Cusk goes deeply inside her characters' heads, and the precision of her observations is extraordinary: "It is the same with people you once cared about. When you meet them again you see your feelings still imprisoned in them, unavailing, like jewels locked in a casket." The author of a 2002 memoir on motherhood (A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother), Cusk is particularly good at depicting the conflicted feelings of new parents and the tensions between couples. Her intelligence and emotional honesty give a sense of having experienced, rather than read, this book.
THRILLER
by George Pelecanos
Fans of Pelecanos's most recent trilogy may be let down by this prequel, which describes the early life of Derek Strange, the detective hero of the searing D.C. cop novels Right as Rain, Hell to Pay and Soul Circus. Pelecanos follows two groups of criminals, one black, one white, planning crimes as Strange gets his badge in 1968. It's the year of riots and assassinations, and Strange's own brother is murdered. So far Pelecanos is on his game; he is masterly at depicting black-white relations and a cop's moral dilemmas. But the usually deft chatter about cars, movies and music that helps define Pelecanos's characters feels formulaic and overdone. And the riot scenes are like newspaper accounts, with characters tracked block by block. That minutiae may intrigue D.C. residents who remember the landmarks, but it stalls a good revenge story.
>The comic novel Love Monkey by Kyle Smith, a PEOPLE Associate Editor, follows the dating misadventures of a wisecracking but soul-searching journalist who is 32 but often acts like a 13-year-old. After falling hard for a lovely coworker, he muses, "This girl is like cleaning behind my refrigerator: a once in a lifetime thing." ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY called Love Monkey "hilarious...a helluva lot of fun."
>WHY WE LOVE
To paraphrase Elizabeth Barrett Browning: How do I love thee... and why? For her book Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, anthropologist Helen Fisher, 58, studied the brain scans of people in love.
LIGHT MY FIRE When someone looks at a picture of their beloved, regions of the brain associated with its desire to win rewards light up.
POWER OF LOVE People feel incredible energy when in love, probably because of increased dopamine [a feel-good chemical] in the brain.
FAST LOVE Men tend to fall in love faster than women.
LOVE IS THE DRUG My advice is to not sleep with [a new person] right away because when you have sex, it drives up the level of oxytocin, a hormone believed to be associated with love, and that causes attachment. Be on guard at the spa as well: Massage drives up levels of oxytocin.
- Contributors:
- Kyle Smith,
- Curtis Sittenfeld,
- Edward Karam.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
