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Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NAMED A BEST BOOK BY PEOPLE AND PARADE * The New York Times bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever Had ("wonderfully immersive...deliciously absorbing"--NPR) returns with another brilliantly observed family drama in which the enduring, hard-won affection of a long marriage faces imminent derailment from events both past and present.
"Infidelity, dysfunction, secrets - this family novel delivers."-- The New York Times * "Lombardo has such a fine eye for the weft and warp of a family's fabric." -- The Washington Post * "Witty and insightful...a powerful exploration of marriage, motherhood, and self."-Bonnie Garmus, bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry
Same As It Ever Was showcases the consummate style, signature wit, and profound emotional intelligence that made The Most Fun We Ever Had one of the most beloved novels of the past decade. Featuring a memorably messy family and the multifaceted marriage at its heart, Lombardo's debut was dubbed "the literary love child of Jonathan Franzen and Anne Tyler" ( The Guardian ) and hailed as "ambitious and brilliantly written" ( Washington Post ). In this remarkable follow-up--another elegant and tumultuous story in the tradition of Elizabeth Strout, Ann Patchett, and Celeste Ng--Lombardo introduces us to an unforgettable cast of characters, this time by way of her singularly complicated protagonist.
Julia Ames, after a youth marked by upheaval and emotional turbulence, has found herself on the placid plateau of mid-life. But Julia has never navigated the world with the equanimity of her current privileged class. Having nearly derailed herself several times, making desperate bids for the kind of connection that always felt inaccessible to her, she finally feels, at age fifty seven, that she has a firm handle on things.
She's unprepared, though, for what comes next: a surprise announcement from her straight-arrow son, an impending separation from her spikey teenaged daughter, and a seductive resurgence of the past, all of which threaten to draw her back into the patterns that had previously kept her on a razor's edge.
Same As It Ever Was traverses the rocky terrain of real life, --exploring new avenues of maternal ambivalence, intergenerational friendship, and the happenstantial cause-and-effect that governs us all. Delving even deeper into the nature of relationships--how they grow, change, and sometimes end--Lombardo proves herself a true and definitive cartographer of the human heart and asserts herself among the finest novelists of her generation.
Rezensionen (3)
Publisher's Weekly-Rezension
Lombardo (The Most Fun We Ever Had) returns with the pitch-perfect tale of a complicated friendship and the fallout from an extramarital affair. Julia Ames, 57, is a married mother of two living in a Chicago suburb. While grocery shopping for her husband's 60th birthday dinner, she encounters an older woman named Helen Russo, one of the "small handful of people whom she has truly hoped to never encounter again." Julia first met Helen 20 years earlier in the botanic garden where she used to take her first child, Ben, when he was three. Back then, in her "pre-Helen energy," Julia was a "hollow-eyed, socially inept young mom" who cried easily. Helen, a wealthy retired attorney and mother of five, took Julia and Ben under her wing, welcoming them into her charmingly messy "Capital-H Home," where people were cheerfully discerning about wine and casually referenced their distinguished forebears. Julia, who came from modest means and was estranged from her mother, was enchanted. Lombardo effortlessly flits from Julia's present-day party preparations and other family occasions--Ben's wedding, her daughter's departure for college--to flashbacks of the women's burgeoning friendship, slowly building to the reason for its dissolution two years after it began: Julia's affair with Helen's 29-year-old son, Nathaniel, who had the "biceps of a Renaissance sculpture." Lombardo is compulsively readable and consistently funny, and it's impossible to look away as Julia continues to self-sabotage. This domestic drama hits all the right notes. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (June)
Kirkus-Rezension
As Julia approaches 60, she clarifies her identity as mother, wife, and daughter in this novel of domestic ambivalence. As well as a meditation on good and bad mothering, this is a novel about "marriage in the aftermath of an affair." Part-time librarian Julia Ames has settled into a long marriage with ever-patient, ever-loving (a little too perfect to believe) husband Mark in the Chicago suburbs. Now, as Julia and Mark face major changes--their 24-year-old son's impending marriage and fatherhood, their daughter's high school graduation and departure for college--a brief encounter with a once close friend prompts Julia to reexamine her personal history. In obsessive, sometimes repetitive detail, she rehashes instances of fear, resentment, and anxiety and her overpowering sense of not fitting in. She also relives the choices she made that almost derailed her life. Julia is not exactly a sympathetic or trustworthy character. Insecure and uncomfortable with most people, including her children--to whom she's offered deep but ambivalent love--she has difficulty expressing affection and tends to shut down difficult conversations with snarky wit. But if she is judgmental, she is most critical of herself and clearly wounded; her single mother had neither time nor inclination to parent her properly, and Julia's hints about a major adolescent trauma build to an eventual anticlimactic reveal. While the "preposterous political landscape" remains in the background, class and entitlement issues are front and center. In addition to her mother's emotional neglect, financial insecurity marred Julia's childhood, rendering her a cynical but keen-eyed observer of the wealthy, educated world in which she has landed, a world that allows Julia's crises, however initially unnerving, to end in soft landings. Lombardo's density of sociological and psychological details is immersive at best but can sometimes be enervating. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist-Rezension
Lombardo's second novel, following The Most Fun We Ever Had (2019), opens with an awkward grocery story encounter between middle-aged Julia and Helen, an older woman with whom Julia was once friends--a friendship linked to a horrible regret. We thus get the first of many subtle glimpses into Julia's past, dangled throughout this engaging tale which crisscrosses various decades of her life. First, the encounter with Helen dredges up memories of when Julia, as a lonely young mom, was drawn into Helen's comforting upper-middle-class world. Later chapters illuminate Julia's teen years, growing up poor with an aloof single mother, a fraught relationship that informs Julia's intimacy issues with her husband, among others. Back in the present, Julia is faced with an impending empty nest, with one child college-bound and the other about to be a parent himself. Lombardo loves her characters, taking time to peel back each of their layers through the time-lapse structure of the novel and her rich descriptions. Her depiction of the Chicago suburbs is also lovely. A sure bet for fans of Richard Russo and Jane Smiley.