Host Family - Hardcover

Mameve Medwed

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0575070412 ISBN 13: 9780575070417

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000

Synopsis

Daisy and Henry Lewis have been married for twenty years. They live near Harvard University where they have long served as a host family for its International students. With the departure of their son for college (less than a mile away) the empty nest turns into a gaping hole. Henry starts calling himself Henri, spattering his conversations with au contraires and mais ouis. She should have seen "it" coming. On the night they win the Host Family award, Henry tells Daisy over sushi that their marriage is finis. Daisy tries to pick up the pieces by falling in love with a parasitologist named Truman Wolff who finds extraordinary similarities between the behaviour of tapeworms and humans. But just as life is regaining some equilibrium, the arrival of a devastatingly good-looking Italian student shakes up the symbiotic combinations and challenges everything Daisy and Henry believe about the meaning of family and the meaning of love. In Host Family, Mameve Medwed, author of the wickedly funny Mail, delivers an irresistibly witty and heartwarming chronicle of the way we live now.

About this title

Review:

Mameve Medwed's second novel follows the breezy Cambridge formula of her popular debut, Mail. Daisy Lewis is a warmly practical, solidly attractive supermarket ombudswoman whose 20-year marriage to Henry, a computer-virus expert, is comfortable and familiar, though no longer exciting. If Daisy grits her teeth a bit at Henry's pretentious passion for all things Français, she's still happy enough, and the Lewises enjoy playing "host family" to a series of slightly forlorn international students. Even when Henry is led astray by a très belle mademoiselle and announces to Daisy that he's writing finis to their marriage, Daisy is more surprised than devastated: "If her marriage ends, the toilet will never get replaced, she supposes. As soon as she thinks this, she is amazed. Her world as she has known it for twenty years is falling apart, and she focuses only on the most inconsequential domestic details. The loss of a power flush rather than the loss of a husband. But it makes sense. She can wrap her mind around a toilet. Marriage, husband, love, life are territories too vast to get a purchase on."

Happily, Rebound City is just around the corner. Henry's laid low by food poisoning that same night, and on a visit to the hospital Daisy meets Truman Wolff, a parasitologist whose ex-wife ran away with a French pastry chef. Drawn together by a series of such small coincidences and serendipities--including the fact that her son and Truman's daughter are madly in love--the two begin living together, though Daisy refuses the doctor's frequent proposals of marriage. When they agree to host an Italian student named Andrea, all hell breaks loose in some very funny--and very uncomfortable--ways. Will Daisy and Truman find their way back to the relationship they're clearly meant to have? Yes, of course, and there are a few other surprising reconciliations along the way. Host Family gives a warm and funny, if not entirely new, twist to the idea of symbiosis. --Barrie Trinkle

About the Author:

Mameve Medwed has written short stories in addition to her other novel, Mail. She is married with two sons, and teaches fiction writing in Cambridge, Mass

About this edition

• Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0575070412
• ISBN 13: 9780575070417
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304