(Mable’s right-she really does need therapy.) Lin's treatment of the glamorous, decadent setting, with its stream of gourmet meals and artisanal cocktails, is far from escapist wealth porn-she has complicated things to say about privilege and its intersection with race, ambition, and identity.Ī probing, astute portrayal of a fraught and late-blooming coming-of-age.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Long-standing flaws in the friendship are exposed by their differing reactions to Robbie and Fauna as well as by Ellie's choppy processing of her complicated grief and rage. At the resort, Ellie and Mable make friends with a somewhat mysterious couple-the man Asian like them, the woman White. This premise sounds like fun, but Lin’s protagonist is no merry widow, and her narrative takes things in a more serious direction. She could pay off the house, but does she even want to live there anymore? Ellie decides to put her windfall to use flying Mable and herself first class to Nice, and then on to the ultra-luxurious Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes. Her best friend, Mable Chou, who has been staying over at Ellie's house every night since the accident, strongly recommends therapy.
In addition, her supervisor at work really thinks she needs to take some time off, as her sentences have stopped making sense. It’s then that a piece of somewhat better news arrives-Ian had life insurance based on a forecast of his future earnings, and Ellie is the sole beneficiary. By the time she learns that her husband, Ian Anderson, a lawyer of less skill and brains but significantly more social elbow grease than she, was screwing this other woman even before he proposed marriage, she’s reeling. After her husband is killed in a car crash, a recently married lawyer learns he was involved with another woman for years.Īnd it’s someone she works with! This disgusting detail is just one piece of an avalanche of bad news that tumbles down on poor Ellie Huang in the first chapters of Lin’s debut.
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