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The Fallback Plan by Leigh Stein
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The Fallback Plan (edition 2012)

by Leigh Stein

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What to do when you've just graduated from college and your plans conflict with those of your parents? That is, when your plans to hang out on the couch, re-read your favorite children's books, and take old prescription tranquilizers, conflict with your parents plans that you, well, get a job? Without a fallback plan, Eshter Kohler decides she has no choice but to take the job her mother has lined up for her: babysitting for their neighbors, the Browns. It's a tricky job, though. Six months earlier, the Browns' youngest child died. Still, as Esther finds herself falling in love with their surviving daughter May, and distracted by a confusing romance with one of her friends, she doesn't notice quite how tricky the job is ... until she finds herself assuming the role of confidante to May's mother Amy, and partner in crime to Amy's husband Nate. Trapped in conflicting roles doomed to collide, Esther is forced to come up with a better idea of who she really is.… (more)
Member:SwensonBooks
Title:The Fallback Plan
Authors:Leigh Stein
Info:Melville House (2012), Paperback, 176 pages
Collections:Your library, Lindsay
Rating:*****
Tags:fiction, Leigh Stein, post-college, humor, Midwest

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The Fallback Plan by Leigh Stein

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I read to page 90 and would have stopped earlier but it was the only book I had with me. Today came with two long subway rides (I am glad they are updating the tracks during Covid, but I am getting a little tired of express trains being made local) and also a long wait since my friend was late to meet me at the museum and the coffee places are still all closed. So read it I did.

The premise: the main character graduates from Northwestern where she had been given a full ride free of charge. Instead of getting a job and maybe living with a bunch of people in a dive while she works at Starbucks and figures out her life, she decides to move back in with her parents. They seem like lovely people, and all she does is bitch about them and the fact they have redecorated "her" room. I have a college senior, and he would never be so nasty nor would he hang out with such stunted and unpleasant people. He also has an artsy major and he is graduating amid Covid and so he has been job hunting for months already though he does not graduate until May. Whatever he does he will do it is a city, and its likely to be something with an arts component (so unlikely to yield the big bucks) and so he fully expects to have lots of roommates for a while. We get along great, and he is always welcome under my roof, but he also feels like it is time to be an adult. I don't even understand this person or her choices.

In addition to my problems with the central narrative, this book is terrible. The writer seems unable to craft a decent sentence to save her life, let alone a good paragraph. The story is snarky in the manner of an overprivileged 8th grader. Every scene is bloated, though to be fair the bloat understandable since the foundation of this is so rickety and undernourished. The main character is of no particular interest unless you are attracted to lazy whiny ungrateful people who care only about their own comfort and pleasure and have the intellectual curiosity of a ferret. I was hoping Esther would overdose on her recreational Vicodin, but no such luck. How did this get published? Its the worst thing I have read this year by a longshot, and I read a lot. ( )
  Narshkite | Jan 6, 2021 |
Confession: I have yet to take my graduation day dress to the dry cleaners. I began with the best intentions. I put the dress in a bag and then I put that bag by the front door. I added a jacket to that bag. And then I left it alone. For two years. I could perhaps claim that there are psychological, symbolic reasons why it is still there — I am holding on to university via the medium of dust, I am externalizing, or displacing, or otherwise-ing in order to keep my inner student chained to the radiator of time! Then there is the other, more likely reason. Laziness. A case of the post-grad, “I was a moderately shiny apple and now I’m back in an orchard full of very shiny apples who know if they want to be eaten in a crumble or sliced for a salad, so maybe I should just fall off the branch and let the dog discover the messy way that apples ain’t for dogs, dawg”. Yeah, just like that.

I figure that a little solipsism is fitting when reviewing Leigh Stein’s The Fallback Plan. Esther Kohler, Stein’s protagonist, is a theatre graduate, who has returned less-than-triumphantly to the old homestead. She spends her days rereading childhood classics, napping, disappointing her parents, and vaguely planning, or thinking about planning, a screenplay about pandas. She also fantasises about contracting a Hollywood movie don’t-I-make-terminal-illness-look-pretty condition:

I’ve always been ambitious. I had my fingers crossed for a disease without a cure, but a mild one, nothing disfiguring or painful. Of all the plans I could have made for how to spend the rest of my life, this seemed the most desirable because it required the least of me. It was a form of surrender (Stein, The Fallback Plan, p.5).

Esther’s slacker routine is interrupted when she is hired to take care of May, the four year old daughter of family friends, Amy and Nate Brown. Mourning the cot-death of their baby, the Browns each form a complicated relationship with Esther. Artist Amy is alternatively a cool aunt type figure, an overprotective mother and another charge for Esther to babysit. Nate, meanwhile, takes one from the Mystic Pizza playbook, and halfheartedly fills the role of the affable, academic dad who Esther, quarter-heartedly at best (it’s a thing), falls for.


(Look! It’s a visual aid! Hello, snazzy knitwear man, your daughter is the one with the stuffed bear, btw.)


I would say more about the plot, but honestly that’s about it. There is Jack, the feckless nimrod who is obviously WRONG in every way, and the Littlest Panda interludes which I was not a huge fan of. But Stein’s real skill is in capturing — perfectly, a little pathetically— the feeling of being lost. That self-centered, head-up-your-own-arse, head-arse under the covers feeling that people can drown, or at least ineptly doggy-paddle in before they put away the Dawson’s Creek DVDs*, remove spoon from the Coco Pops box, and decide that enough is enough. Will it be yes or will it be...sorry?

Save the Spiel: The Fallback Plan is a short, funny, interesting novel. Read it.

Want more drama? Try: A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
Want more entitled, postgrad woe? Try: The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank or The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld
Want more Esther? Try: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath ( )
  ManthaLockett | Jun 1, 2014 |
I had a whole review of this written out that featured, among other things, a dig at Gary Shteyngart and the admission that I've never read the Chronicles of Narnia. Then it got deleted. So basically, very funny and fairly relatable book that also features a bunch of astoundingly self-centered characters, some with better reasons than others. The protag claims to have realized that adulthood is not something that magically happens, that it's more like something that you stumble through, but she's having difficulties remembering that that applies to other people, too, and not just her. ( )
  kszym | Apr 3, 2013 |
A slight but pleasant coming-of-age story—the fact that it occurs when Esther moves back home after college just points out how much America's middle-class suburban youth are sheltered from any actual experience of life. In any other context (Austen, Kipling, Salinger, you name it) the kid would've had these epiphanies at 14 or 16, not 22. Although it seems to be marketed to adults, I put it on my YA shelf.

(The digest size and almost-newsprint paper Melville House picked are perfect—they tell the reader (buyer) to expect something slight. But the wide outer margins and somewhat classy type (Bembo) belie that and suggest that the book has pretensions to literature. I guess maybe they had to do something to justify the $14.95 cover price.) ( )
  localcharacter | Apr 2, 2013 |
The Good: After reading the blurb I was really excited because this book seemed to be the answer to a question I've been asking lately... where are all the books about 20-somethings that just graduated. I seem to only find either YA characters or older characters in books these days. So needless to say I was excited to see a 22 year old college graduate featured as the main character. Leigh's MC, Esther is so familiar she could be one of my friends. She is suffering from post-college anxiety and dealing with what so many of my friends are dealing with right now. Not only is she depressed about moving back in with her parents, but she has no job, no future plans and she is embarrassed about all of this. What I liked about this novel was the internal dialogue going on in Esther's head. She encounters some pretty heavy things and I think watching Esther muddle her way through it is much like watching ourselves do the same thing. The relationship she makes with the Browns is intriguing to me. I did like the way Leigh is forcing her readers to wonder what a "family" would look like after the death of a child.

The Bad: I can appreciate what Leigh was trying to accomplish with the novel but I just don't think it achieved it quite successfully. There was so much more she could have done with Esther's character. I want to sympathize with Esther but most of the time I don't. She is the type of character that I want to shake and yell at saying, "get the hell over it." I felt I was more annoyed with Esther than anything and I'm not sure that is the way Leigh intended her readers to take Esther. There wasn't a lot of action and hardly any "plot" per say. I really wanted her to go more in depth with Amy, Nate and May. They were by far the most interesting part of the story. In fact...I felt like this was more Amy's story than it was Esther's. Perhaps that's what it should have been.

Overall it was a nice, quick read but probably not a book that I will rave about weeks later. It does bring up an interesting idea about families that suffer the loss of a child and life afterwards. I give this book an C+ ( )
  hankesj | May 5, 2012 |
Showing 1-5 of 9 (next | show all)
Esther's initial lethargy is so complete readers may wonder why they should bother to keep turning the pages. If they do, they will be rewarded with a graceful twist of redemption. The mix of self-absorption, depression, and grief does not always sit well together, but Stein makes the final chapters work.
added by Christa_Josh | editLibrary Journal, Jan Blodgett (Oct 15, 2011)
 
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What to do when you've just graduated from college and your plans conflict with those of your parents? That is, when your plans to hang out on the couch, re-read your favorite children's books, and take old prescription tranquilizers, conflict with your parents plans that you, well, get a job? Without a fallback plan, Eshter Kohler decides she has no choice but to take the job her mother has lined up for her: babysitting for their neighbors, the Browns. It's a tricky job, though. Six months earlier, the Browns' youngest child died. Still, as Esther finds herself falling in love with their surviving daughter May, and distracted by a confusing romance with one of her friends, she doesn't notice quite how tricky the job is ... until she finds herself assuming the role of confidante to May's mother Amy, and partner in crime to Amy's husband Nate. Trapped in conflicting roles doomed to collide, Esther is forced to come up with a better idea of who she really is.

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