Distress in Westport

I know novelist Cathleen Schine (The New Yorkers) to be a talented and amusing writer, but somehow I have never been attracted to her stories. Her new novel, The Three Weissmanns of Westport (FSG), is reportedly an homage to Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility—which makes me wonder what one misses if Austen’s classic has not been part of one’s literary diet.

Not much, I would reckon, except for the smug intellectual games one may play when one has such information in hand. The Three Weissmans gives us Annie and Miranda, two sisters, and Betty, their 75-year-old mother, who has been thrown aside by her 78-year-old husband for a younger woman, and then evicted from their Manhattan apartment by her successor—thus the Weissman women repair to the cushy seaside town of Westport, C.T. Their new accommodations are not so cushy.

The Weissmans’ story begins:

The New Yorker’s short review is spot on: “The ironic title—the three are anything but wise men—does little justice to Schine’s real wit, which playfully probes the lies, self-deceptions, and honorable hearts of her characters.”

Dominique Browning’s take (which is a nimble and informative piece of writing in itself) on Schine’s novel includes this acute insight:

Under the snap and sizzle of the story there lurks a profound tragedy—in the heartbreak of the jettisoned wife, chucked out “to spin helplessly in the dark, infinite sky of elderly divorce.” Annie’s writer boyfriend gives readings in front of “a hundred such women, a thousand… Older women, still beautiful in their older way, still vibrant in their older way, with their beauty and vibrancy suddenly accosted by the one thing beauty and vibrancy cannot withstand—irrelevance.”