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Summary
Summary
Cathleen Schine offers a modern retelling of Jane Austen's beloved Sense and Sensibility. Set in Westport, Connecticut, Schine's novel follows the lives of two sisters, Miranda and Anne Weissmann, and their mother, Betty, through a maze of suburban aristocratic romance.
Summary
In this sparkling contemporary adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, sisters Miranda, an impulsive but successful literary agent, and Annie, a pragmatic library director, quite unexpectedly find themselves the middle-aged products of a broken home when their mother, Betty, is dumped by her husband of nearly fifty years. Exiled from her elegant New York apartment by her husband's new mistress, Betty is forced to move to a small, run-down beach cottage in Westport, Connecticut, owned by her wealthy and generous Cousin Lou. Joining her are Miranda, who is escaping unexpected literary scandals, and Annie, who dutifully comes along to keep on eye on her capricious mother and sister. As the sisters mingle with the suburban aristocracy, love starts to blossom for both of them, and they find themselves struggling with the dueling demands of reason and romance.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A geriatric stepfather falls in love with a scheming woman half his age in Schine's Sense and Sensibility-flecked and compulsively readable follow-up to The New Yorkers. Betty Weissman is 75 when Joseph, her husband of nearly 50 years, announces he's divorcing her. Soon, Betty moves out of their grand Central Park West apartment and Joseph's conniving girlfriend, Felicity, moves in. Betty lands in a rundown Westport, Conn., beach cottage, but things quickly get more complicated when Betty's daughters run into their own problems. Literary agent Miranda is sued into bankruptcy after it's revealed that some of her authors made up their lurid memoirs, and Annie, drowning in debt, can no longer afford her apartment. Once they relocate to Westport, both girls fall in love-Annie rather awkwardly with the brother of her stepfather's paramour, and Miranda with a younger actor who has a young son. An Austen-esque mischief hovers over these romantic relationships as the three women figure out how to survive and thrive. It's a smart crowd pleaser with lovably flawed leads and the best tearjerker finale you're likely to read this year. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
It may be hard to envision a novel of manners set in our ill-mannered times, but accomplished author Schine has captured the essence of Sense and Sensibility and dropped it into today's Manhattan and Westport. The Weissmanns, elderly mother and two mature daughters driven to penury by divorce and career reversals, must rely on the beneficence of Cousin Lou for the shabby roof over their heads. Annie, still modestly employed as a librarian, has both salary and an apartment to sublet, so it falls to her to provide the income for the three. Alas, the other two spend money as if it were still the old days. Mother Betty affects widowhood as it is easier than the pending divorce. Sister Miranda finds inappropriate love. The wide-ranging cast of characters fools, scoundrels, poseurs, the good-hearted, and secret heroes provides interesting interplay.Wild coincidences abound, so that Manhattan, Westport, and Palm Springs are but mere extensions of the classic drawing room. There is sadness but also love in this thoroughly enjoyable, finely crafted modern novel.--Hoover, Danise Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Once upon a time, not so very long ago, there were two sisters who lived in Manhattan. One was wildly emotional, the other smartly sensible. The sisters found love, as lovely women do, and they lost love, but no matter where love went they always worked hard and had rich lives. Now these sisters also had a sweet, beloved mother, whose own fairy tale of a life suddenly came apart when one day her sweet, beloved husband came home and announced that he was divorcing her. She was 75 years old. She was banished from her handsomely appointed Central Park West apartment. Her daughters rushed to her rescue. But their lives were falling apart, too. One was broke and disgraced, the other lonely and worried. Both were in danger of misplacing their hearts yet again. So they all moved to an enchanted cottage. . . . And off races the sparkling, crisp, clever, deft, hilarious and deeply affecting new novel by Cathleen Schine, her best yet, "The Three Weissmanns of Westport." Shall we quickly usher Jane Austen through? Dear readers will recognize the essential outlines of "Sense and Sensibility." Poor Jane - or is she lucky, to have been the object of such ransacking posthumous reverence? In recent years, "Emma," "Pride and Prejudice" and "Persuasion" have been hauled in to prop up the likes of the Bridget Jones novels, the movie "Clueless" and countless other projects. Austen is now considered the godmother of chick lit, whatever that is -let's just say, to heighten the inherent absurdity, any novel written by women about women for women, as even the idea of a chick being young is no longer operative. (After all, cougars are chicks too.) Nor is it necessarily a man who is the heroine's salvation. SCHINE sets her novel squarely in the most appealing part of chick-lit territory - its light-hearted readability - and then thumbs her nose as she starts kicking up the dust. The strange thing about the Jane brigade is that most of its practitioners have raided only her plots, apparently not quite up to the task of honoring the essence of Austen. But Schine's homage has it all: stinging social satire, mordant wit, delicate charm, lilting language and cosseting materialistic detail. "The Three Weissmanns of Westport" is richly inhabited. Schine's characters, minor and major, have such a precisely imagined presence that they need only nod with affectionate courtesy to the shadows cast by "Sense and Sensibility" before chasing them away. One of the sisters, even-tempered Annie, a librarian, lives in "the soft dappled world" of 19th-century English novels; she takes a mouthy, pacifying pleasure in simple words, like "jalopy." The other sister, fierce, self-absorbed, beautiful, loyal, tender Miranda, who "found talent and excitement everywhere," is a literary agent until she is disgraced by scandal, which Schine describes in a hilarious send-up of our own recent crop of lying writers and the television personalities who hype them too much. Schine is clearly a writer who loves to read as much as she loves to write. And it is great fun to play English major with her. I indulged in a gratifying Austen binge (it had been a while), just for the pleasure of tracing the plot lines that are borrowed here, along with lots of other fine and wicked riffs. "The Three Weissmanns of Westpprt" is a dense fruitcake of apposite references: I spotted Louisa May Alcott (Annie "is too fond of books. It has turned her brain"); Emily Dickinson (who "made even fear feel rich and full and active"); and Dickens's Mr. Micawber (whose hopeful expectation makes him Annie's role model). With a resounding thwack, Schine also delivers a swift kick to certain middle-aged male writers when Annie falls for someone in spite of his work - which embodies "the qualities she disliked in both the Jewish writers of his generation (that showing off masked as neurosis) and the WASPs (the coldness masked as modesty)." In this rarefied, upper-middle-class, genteel world, books and money matter. So does being Jewish, in a reformed, mildly self-mocking sort of way. The Weissmann parents, for whom Nazis are a living memory, are ever mindful of their social roles. "The goyim . . . do not feed their guests; it is not their custom," the girls' mother explains, bringing a cake as a gift while paying a social call. "We must respect the customs of other cultures, but that does not mean we have to starve." While they're decorating their Christmas tree, her husband reminds the girls that "this holiday celebrates the birth of a man in whose name an entire religion has persecuted and murdered our people for thousands of years. . . . And knowing that, why should we let them have all the fun?" The plot takes appropriately unexpected twists and turns as the sisters carom through their love affairs. I, for one, can't wait for the inevitable movie. But "The Three Weissmanns of Westport" is much more than a romantic comedy. Or, rather, the romance is located in motherhood and in memories of childhood, as much as in a lover's bed. Whether she's describing tender moments with a 2-year-old or with young adult sons, Schine is perceptive, even breathtaking, in her observations. There's also real pain in these pages. The characters he awake in the middle of the night, agonizing, careers smashed, bank accounts emptied. "Old age was now, too, caught up in the stink of financial worry. She was a successful woman in her early 50s and cutting corners the way she had as a graduate student." That will feel sadly familiar to thousands of us. UNDER the snap and sizzle of the story there lurks a profound tragedy - in the heartbreak of the jettisoned wife, chucked out "to spin helplessly in the dark, infinite sky of elderly divorce." Annie's writer boyfriend gives readings in front of "a hundred such women, a thousand. . . . Older women, still beautiful in their older way, still vibrant in their older way, with their beauty and vibrancy suddenly accosted by the one thing beauty and vibrancy cannot withstand - irrelevance." Chicks need a happy ending, at least every once in a while. What choice is there but to believe that something good will happen? Schine gives her characters more than their fair share of luck, but she is also brave enough to let them wrestle with raw fear. Among its many gifts to the dearest sort of reader, a fully engaged one, "The Three Weissmanns of Westport" offers the chance for a meditation on that snake of Emily Dickinson's as it slithers through the grass - the snake that sometimes startles and frightens us, so undefended and unprepared are we, caught in our "tighter breathing, and zero at the bone." Schine's characters need only nod with affectionate courtesy to the shadows cast by 'Sense and Sensibility.' Dominique Browning writes an online column for the Environmental Defense Fund. Her new memoir, "Slow Love," will be published in May.
Kirkus Review
Already recognized for her own witty romantic comedies of manners, Schine (The New Yorkers, 2008, etc.) joins the onslaught of Austen imitators. Upper-middle-class, mostly Jewish New Yorkers take the place of British gentry in this Sense and Sensibility riff. After 48 years of marriage, 78-year-old Joseph Weissman leaves his 75-year-old wife Betty for Felicity Barrow, a younger woman with whom he works. Although Josie (as his stepdaughters call him) repeatedly swears he wants to be generous to Betty, Felicity manipulates him into closing Betty's credit-card accounts and forcing her out of the Weissmans' Upper West Side apartment she herself paid for decades ago. Fortunately, kindly Cousin Lou lends Betty his abandoned cottage in Westport, Conn., and Betty's daughters, outraged on their mother's behalf although they don't stop loving Josie, move in with her. Romantic, never married but often in love, 49-year-old Miranda is in dire financial straits herself, as scandals concerning the memoirists she represents threaten to bankrupt her literary agency. Sensible Annie, briefly married and long divorced, has successfully raised two sons while working at a privately endowed library. Now living in stoic loneliness, she has begun to fall in love with famous author Frederick Barrow, who happens to be Felicity's brother and whose grown offspring jealously guard his affections. In Westport, Annie is hurt when Frederick practically ignores her at a gathering at Cousin Lou's. Meanwhile, Miranda has an affair with the handsome young actor next door and falls seriously in love with his two-year-old son. Feisty Betty begins to refer to herself as a widow. In true Austen fashion, love and money conquer all, although Schine adds some modern sorrow and a slightly off-putting disdain for her male characters, who range from narcissistically foolish to, in what passes for the romantic hero, pragmatic and unoffending. Infectious fun, but the tweaked version never quite lives up to the original. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Drawing on Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Schine (The New Yorkers) has written a witty update in which a late-life divorce exiles Betty Weissmann and her adult daughters, Annie and Miranda, from a luxurious life in New York to a shabby beach cottage in Westport, CT. Annie is the serious daughter and Miranda the drama queen. Both women find unexpected love, while Betty, a sweet, frivolous spendthrift, struggles with her newly impoverished state. What comfort the Weissmanns enjoy is owing to the generosity of Cousin Lou, a Holocaust survivor and real-estate mogul, whose goal in life is to rescue everyone, whether or not rescue is needed. While beautifully preserving the essence of the plot, Schine skillfully manages to parallel the original novel in clever 21st-century ways-the trip to London becomes a holiday in Palm Springs; the scoundrel Willoughby becomes a wannabe actor. Verdict Austen lovers and those who enjoyed updates like Paula Marantz Cohen's Jane Austen in Boca and Jane Austen in Scarsdale should appreciate this novel. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/09.]-Andrea Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
