Perfect Life: A Novel - Hardcover

Shattuck, Jessica

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393069508 ISBN 13: 9780393069501

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009

Synopsis

In Perfect Life, Jessica Shattuck once again displays her “skewering gift for social commentary” (New York Times) in a uniquely modern chronicle of conception in the age of infinite possibility.

Two years ago, Neil Banks walked into a bathroom in the Pacific Fertility Center to provide his former college girlfriend, Jenny Callahan, with the biological material needed to conceive a child. Becoming a father was not part of the deal: adrift in his postmodern Los Angeles lifestyle, he signed away all paternity rights. But on the day of the baby’s christening, Neil turns up at the church. His unexpected―and unauthorized―return to Jenny’s privileged East Coast world sends a shockwave through the families of Jenny and her two college roommates―and sets off this keenly observed novel about fertility, biology, love, and American excess.

Elegantly written, Perfect Life asks the perennially daunting question: What is the perfect life? In her smart and timely new novel, Jessica Shattuck tells a story that is humorous and moving, enlightening and life-affirming.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Advance praise for Perfect Life

“Perfect Life is a vivid, fascinating snapshot of the way some of us live now. Jessica Shattuck’s engrossing, deceptively ambitious novel explores a wide range of subjects―from the logistics of adultery and the complexities of friendship to the nuts and bolts of video game design and pharmaceutical marketing―with a shrewd and sympathetic eye.”―Tom Perrotta, author of The Abstinence Teacher

“In graceful, lambent prose, Jessica Shattuck explores modern life, with all its moral ambiguity and complicated compromises, never judging, always illuminating. A beautiful book.”―Janice Y. K. Lee, author of The Piano Teacher

“Jessica Shattuck writes warmly and wryly of family, friendship, nature versus nurture, and the quest for the perfect life. This novel is smart, funny, and life-affirming in all its permutations.”―Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of The Scenic Route

About the Author:

Jessica Shattuck is the New York Times bestselling author of The Women in the Castle, The Hazards of Good Breeding (a New York Times Notable Book and finalist for the PEN/Winship Award), and Perfect Life. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Glamour, Mother Jones, and Wired among others. A graduate of Harvard University, she received her MFA from Columbia University. Shattuck now lives with her husband and three children in Brookline, MA.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0393069508
• ISBN 13: 9780393069501
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336