From the author of the best-selling Le Divorce and Le Mariage, a
comedy of contemporary manners, morals, (ex)marriages, and motherhood
(past, present, and future)--about an American woman leaving her 20-year
marriage to her French second husband, returning to her native San
Francisco and to the entwining lives of her children and grandchildren.
"Delightful"--Claire Messud (Harper's Magazine); "Razor-sharp prose
and astute observations ... a treat"--Publishers Weekly (starred
review).
Lorna Mott Dumas, small, pretty, high-strung, the epitome of a
successful woman--lovely offspring, grandchildren, health, a French
husband, a delightful house and an independent career as an admired art
lecturer involving travel and public appearances, expensive clothes.
She's a woman with an uncomplicated, sociable nature and an intellectual
life.
But in an impulsive and planned decision, Lorna has decided to leave
her husband, a notorious tombeur (seducer), and his small ancestral
village in France, and return to America, much more suited to her
temperament than the rectitude of formal starchy France. For Lorna, a
beautiful idyll is over, finished, done . . .
In Lorna Mott Comes Home, Diane Johnson brings us into the dreamy,
anxiety-filled American world of Lorna Mott Dumas, where much has
changed and where she struggles to create a new life to support herself.
Into the mix--her ex-husband, and the father of her three grown children
(all supportive), and grandchildren with their own troubles (money,
divorce, real estate, living on the fringe; a thriving software
enterprise; a missing child in the far east; grandchildren--new hostages
to fortune; and, one, 15 years old, a golden girl yet always different,
diagnosed at a young age with diabetes, and now pregnant and determined
to have the child) . . .
In the midst of a large cast, the precarious balance of comedy and
tragedy, happiness and anxiety, contentment and striving, generosity and
greed, love and sex, Diane Johnson, our Edith Wharton of expat life,
comes home to America to deftly, irresistibly portray, with the lightest
of touch, the way we live now.
