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by Diane Johnson
From the author of the best-selling Le Divorce and Le Mariage, a sly, subversive comedy of contemporary manners, morals, (ex)marriages, and motherhood (past, present, and future)--about an American woman, an art lecturer, in her sixties, leaving her 20-year marriage to her French second husband, returning to her native San Francisco to pick up a life (hardly recognizable) she left behind and the entwining lives of her children and grandchildren, going slightly awry.
Lorna Mott Dumas, small, pretty, high-strung, the epitome of a successful woman--lovely offspring, grandchildren, health, a French husband, a delightful house and an independent career as an admired art lecturer involving travel and public appearances, expensive clothes. She's a woman with an uncomplicated, sociable nature and an intellectual life.
But in an impulsive and planned decision, Lorna has decided to leave her husband, a notorious tombeur (seducer), and his small ancestral village in France, and return to America, much more suited to her temperament than the rectitude of formal starchy France. For Lorna, a beautiful idyll is over, finished, done...
In Lorna Mott Comes Home, Diane Johnson brings us into the dreamy, anxiety-filled American world of Lorna Mott Dumas, where much has changed and where she struggles to create a new life to support herself. Into the mix--her ex-husband, and the father of her three grown children (all supportive), and grandchildren with their own troubles (money, divorce, real estate, living on the fringe; a thriving software enterprise; a missing child in the far east; grandchildren--new hostages to fortune; and, one, 15 years old, a golden girl yet always different, diagnosed at a young age with diabetes, and now pregnant and determined to have the child)...
In the midst of a large cast, the precarious balance of comedy and tragedy, happiness and anxiety, contentment and striving, generosity and greed, love and sex, Diane Johnson, our Edith Wharton of expat life, comes home to America to deftly, irresistibly portray, with the lightest of touch, the way we live now.
"Johnson's usual razor-sharp prose and astute observations are on full display as she tweaks comic incidents arising out of her characters' relationships. This provocative family chronicle resolves in a poignant ending with prospects for a promising sequel. The author's fans are in for a treat." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"In her 18th book, Johnson, now 86, returns with undimmed joie de vivre to the delicious Francophile vein she mined so successfully in her National Book Award finalist Le Divorce (1997) and other novels...Doing what she does best, Johnson shows us why she's been compared to writers like Henry James, Jane Austen, and Voltaire." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Delightfully absurd...incisive...Johnson gently but deftly skewers everyone as they scheme for financial gain and languorously search for meaning and happiness." - Booklist
"The crises here aren't huge, but they are real and insightfully played as Johnson delivers a satisfying understanding of life's constant vagaries." - Library Journal
"Briskly witty...delightful...an engaging confection...clever, dry, and often highly amusing." - Harper's Magazine
This information about Lorna Mott Comes Home was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Diane Johnson is a bestselling author and two-time finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Paris and San Francisco.
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