A Perfect Arrangement - Softcover

Berne, Suzanne

2.93

488 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452283221 ISBN 13: 9780452283220

Publisher: Plume, 2002

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Mirella and Howard Cook-Goldman's new nanny, Randi Gill, seems perfect, but when their seamless life begins to unravel, the young woman assumes an inappropriate place in the family structure.

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Review:

The setup for Suzanne Berne's second novel sounds positively gothic: Mirella (a lawyer) and Howard (an architect) desperately need a nanny to care for their two small children. Without carefully checking her references, they welcome the cozy-seeming Randi into their creaky Colonial saltbox. At first the arrangement does seem perfect: Randi cooks, cleans, and works wonders with the heretofore recalcitrant children. But slowly it becomes clear that her sunny, reliable temperament might be cloaking a darker past. In elegant, sometimes quite funny prose, Berne cleverly readies the reader for domestic atrocities in the gruesome tradition of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Then she subverts our expectations by showing that Mirella and Howard have their secrets, too--quiet compromises they've made to achieve their ideal home. The reader keeps waiting for the nanny horror show to begin, and meanwhile Berne shows a family falling apart under the pressure of trying to appear perfect. "Disaster could be small and dull and corrosive," she writes. "It might already have come."

To up the ante, Berne has installed her domestic m�nage in a charming New England town, where main street is populated by quaint shops, and unsightly necessities (such as, say, the grocery store) are relegated to the hinterlands. Inhabiting the equivalent of a Norman Rockwell painting, each character is further pressed to idealize the notion of family; each has a distinctive mental image of what a home should look like. Anger and frustration and failure are suppressed until they surface in horrible, comic eruptions. Thus do Berne's characters ultimately learn to appreciate the "terrible, desirable, exhausting plenitude" of life. Admirers of Joanna Trollope's domestic dramas--by turns witty and harrowing--should find much to love in A Perfect Arrangement. --Claire Dederer

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Praise for A Perfect Arrangement:

"Suzanne Berne has many gifts, among them the talent to describe with eloquence and empathy the fault line of her characters. There's an exotic beauty in Berne's natural world as well. In A Perfect Arrangement everyday life outdoors for the Cook - Goldmans is illuminated with the clarity and color of a Maxfield Parrish illustration. Inside the house, Berne's beloved and flawed people struggle to make their way in love and work in the all too modern world." (Jane Hamilton, author of A Map of the World and Disobedience)

"Who is 'authorized' to love us, to love our children, our work - finally, who deserves to share the bounty of our lives? Suzanne Berne examines many kinds of possession, parental, erotic, economic, even environmental, and dramatizes these very challenging questions with dead-on aim and just what A Crime in the Neighborhood led us to expect: a scrupulous, unsentimental sympathy beautifully served by the precision of her prose." (Rosellen Brown, author of Half a Heart and Before and After)

Praise for A Crime in the Neighborhood

"A remarkable first novel that captures the history of child-parent relations in the last quarter-century, from the adults' betrayal to the new generation's revenge." (The New York Times Book Review)

"A Crime in the Neighborhood resonates with those fragile necessities of life, keenly aware of the scent of newly mowed lawns and the dangers that might land on any one of them." (The Boston Globe)

"In this novel, Berne's first, the telling is an exciting and elegant as the story being told." (USA Today)

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