Marcy Dermansky

What about us? she wanted to ask him, despite the fact that she did not want an "us." But she would have loved to live in this house. There was that.

It took some convincing for Johnny to get Joanie to agree to a date. She finally agreed to have dinner with him, while their children watched movies in his basement rec room. Partway through the date, when Joanie is realizing she's not at all attracted to Johnny, but she is very attracted to his house, a hot air balloon crashes into the backyard show more pool. Things rapidly become weirder and soon Joanie and her daughter are being taken to the home of a famous billionaire, after a night of wild behavior on the part of everyone except Joanie.

She would not have sympathy for a rich man's regret about how he spent his money.

Marcy Dermansky has written several books now about women following their whims and blowing up their own lives. This novel marks a change, where Joanie tries to figure out what is best for her daughter and herself, but also she's tired of being a single parent, of getting out of a bad marriage only to have to scramble to keep her and her daughter in a small apartment that doesn't allow pets. Joanie's doing her best, and she's tired, so when the billionaires look to her and her daughter for a diversion, she's ready to let them take care of her, although she realizes that none of this is under her control.

Dermansky knows how to craft a series of escalating scenes and somehow make them feel possible. Here, she starts with an unbelievable situation -- not that a billionaire would be able to force responsible professionals to loan him a hot air balloon he has no business operating -- but that it would land safely in a small swimming pool instead of crashing on a highway or becoming tangled in power lines, and made me shrug and just go with where she was taking this madcap story. This book is both fun and pointed, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. show less

Rachel is taking care of her writing prof's poodle in exchange for a good grade. She also slept with him, but because she wanted to, not for an A. She takes the dog home for the summer, where her mother is still adjusting to life without her husband, who has left her to live in Tribeca with an airline pilot. Zahid, the writing professor, had a successful debut novel but he's spent the advance for his second novel long ago and now needs to find a new teaching position, so he sub-lets his show more apartment to the sister of his best friend, a woman who works in the male-dominated world of finance.

This is a short novel with many characters, all of whom get to be the centers of their own chapters. And the novel has a broad reach, from dissatisfaction in an affluent commuter town, to the misogynistic reaches of New York finance, to the inner workings of publishing and academia. So it shouldn't work. The characters should be one-dimensional. And yet, Marcy Dermansky manages to pull it all off. There are a ton of characters, all of them behaving in the most outrageous of ways, yet they all feel very human. Zahid may be sleeping with the mother of the student he once slept with, and to be angling very hard to become her kept man, but somehow I couldn't not be pleased when his writing was going well. Dermansky has a talent for connecting her characters to the reader very quickly, regardless of what kind of self-destructive behavior they are engaged in or how selfish they are and here that talent is able to take a large collection of characters, all behaving badly, in a wide variety of situations, and make a cohesive novel out of it. I do prefer it the intense experience she creates when keeping her writing tightly focused on a single character (The Red Car is a fantastic book) but with Very Nice, Dermansky set her difficulty rating much higher and landed every jump. show less

Marie is an ex-convict cum nanny who reminds one of the Russian fable about the scorpion and the turtle: Promising not to sting, the scorpion overcomes the turtle's better judgement and scores a ride across the river. Reaching the other side, the scorpion stings and kills the turtle anyway saying in defense, "I am sorry, but I couldn't resist the urge. It's in my nature." There are a few turtles in this story, including Ellen, the childhood friend who hires Marie on; Benoît Doniel, Ellen's show more husband who has written Marie's favorite book; an Oscar-Award nominated actor who provides Marie a taste of life on the French Riviera... What becomes clear however, is that as Marie goes on the lam, is that these "turtles" have natures and stingers of their own. The only innocent of the story is Marie's charge, the toddler Katy, who attenuates Marie's proclivities. Still, there is a harrowing scene in which it becomes clear that even Katy cannot redeem "Bad Marie" however much we may root for Marie. show less

I am not sure what to say about this one. It is unlike anything I (or anyone who has not read this specific book) have ever read before. My son asked me what I was reading and what it was about. I told him the book's name, and told him that it was about unresolved grief, unsuccessful efforts to flee one's problems, how fundamentally self-serving most people are, and head injuries. He asked if any of those were metaphors. My answer was no, no, no, and yes, but only partially.

I loved the show more ratatat rhythm of the book. I loved the subtlety of the satire, I appreciated the nakedness of the selfishness in every character except Danny (who was basic but kind), the sadness of everyone's privilege, the sympathetic perpetrator and the obnoxious victim. I thought a little something was missing, that too much was left to subtext. This was especially true with regard to how hard it was to tell if Allison was entirely horrible and disconnected (even as compared to her horrible and disconnected friend, mother and brother), or just dealing with the aftereffects of head injury. Because of this feeling of a missing piece, I wavered between a 4 and a 5. I went with a 5, because how often do I read things that completely surprise me in a good way? This book shouldn't work, but boy, does it ever work.

One note though -- this is NOT horror. I cannot figure out why people identify this as horror. show less