Als een Amerikaanse professor zijn twee volwassen kinderen uitnodigt in het ouderlijk huis, waarvan hij de hypotheek niet meer kan betalen, komen de frustraties uit het verleden naar boven ( )

This is the sort of novel destined to divide readers into camps. Ridker’s social satire is of the overt type, resulting in characters that are too ridiculous to like and situations that are too silly to generate sympathy or empathy. If you enjoy your satire spread thick, then you’ll enjoy this. If, however, you prefer your social commentary on the subtle side, or if you were hoping for a thoughtful exploration of dysfunctional familihood, then you’ll want to look elsewhere. Those blurbs promising a tale that is “big hearted” or “moving” are stretching it - fundamentally, this is a social parody in which egoism, obtuseness, privilege, passivity, neurosis, and profound hypocrisy play featured roles.

The altruists in the novel are, of course, nothing of the sort: they are, instead, absurdly self-absorbed. The pater familias, Arthur Alter, is a failed professor whose one shining accomplishment was traveling to Zimbabwe as an idealistic youth to install sanitation infrastructure – an endeavor that, predictably, goes horribly awry. Since then he’s become the opposite of an altruist: a whiny parasite of a man living off of the pity and passivity of others. The daughter, Maggie, having convinced herself that self-deprivation is the ultimate measure of character, imagines she is living a life of enlightened virtue even as she engages in increasingly outrageous acts of borishness, narcissism, and theft. The son, Ethan, is obsessed with the quioxitic fixation that his gay childhood crush is just waiting for him (Ethan) to help him accept his true sexuality. And the mater familias, Francine, is the enabler who makes it all possible – so much so that, when she dies, the whole family immediately implodes, the event that ostensibly sets the events of this novel in motion.

Don’t get me wrong: Ridkin can bring the funny. Understated passages like “The university had recently consolidated the College of Fine Arts, the Center for Media Studies, and their entrepreneurship MBA into the centralized Institute for Business Arts” made me laugh aloud. But the more exaggerated elements of the novel – Arthur’s selfishness and parsimony, Maggie’s hypocrisy, the author’s constant sniping at “political correctness” - were just a bit too crude for my tastes. Moreover, I couldn’t help wondering whether Ridkin’s purpose here was less about entertaining readers than trying to impress the hipster peers at the New Yorker or the Iowa Writer’s Workshop with his wit. ( )

I really enjoyed this story of the Alter family. The writing was sharp and sarcastically funny. I didn’t think Ridker could land this puppy, but he did to a surprisingly satisfying conclusion. ( )

Arthur Alter is in a tight spot. He took the visiting professor job at Danforth College, convinced he'd quickly be hired full-time and be given tenure. Despite moving his family across the country and derailing his wife's more successful career, he never moves into a permanent posting, instead being given fewer classes to teach over the years, so that now he's down to one. His children live far away and don't speak to him. And his wife may have had money when she died, but she left it all to the children. Maybe because Arthur coincidentally started an affair the same day Francine received her diagnosis? Arthur prefers not to think about that. He's got a bigger problem. When they first moved to St. Louis, they bought a house in keeping with Arthur's aspirations, and not his circumstances, which are that he's making a little less each year. And his girlfriend is thinking of taking a better paying job elsewhere. But Arthur can fix it all if he can get his son and daughter to come and visit. He'll convince them to give him the money they inherited from their mother. And once he has the money to pay off the mortgage, he's sure he can convince his girlfriend to turn down the new job and move in with him.

The only problem with this plan is that Arthur has once again over-estimated his powers of persuasion, his girlfriend's willingness to do what he wants and his job prospects, while under-estimating the sheer animosity his children hold for him.

Yes, this is another WMFuN*, that perennial staple of American literature. But this has some redeeming features. It's set in St. Louis and not New York City. Arthur may be the classic WMFuN protagonist, being both self-involved and oblivious to the harm he causes, but Andrew Ridker isn't asking the reader to side with Arthur, in fact he goes out of the way to clearly show the harm Arthur does. And it's well written, with a relaxed solidity to the writing that is surprising in a debut novel. No, I never warmed completely to Arthur and his equally self-involved off-spring, but no matter how I tried, I was never able to not care about what happened to them.

* White Male Fuck-up Novel ( )

This book reminded me of several novels I've read recently centering on the lives of professors and their disfunctional families. It put me in the mind of The Straight Man by Russo and some of Susan Choi's books. These characters were a bit more likable and some of the writing was TERRIFIC. When I realized that the author was born in 1991, I really was impressed!! He seems young to have written in such thoughtful manner. I have trouble with reading about so many academics messing up their lives SO terrifically...Nevertheless, this was a good read. I would have liked a bit more clarity at times about the narrator. ( )