The Three Weissmanns of Westport

From the Publisher

“Schine’s homage to Jane Austen has it all....A sparkling, crisp, clever, deft, hilarious, and deeply affecting new novel, her best yet . . . Schine is clearly a writer who loves to read as much as she loves to write. And it is great fun to play English major with her.” —Dominique Browning, The New York Times Book Review

“Schine has been favored in so many ways by the muse of comedy . . . The Three Weissmanns of Westport is full of invention, wit, and wisdom that can bear comparison to Austen’s own.” —The New York Review of Books

“A success…Sharp-edged satire.” —Marion Winik, The Miami Herald

“A clever, frothy novel…Schine playfully probes the lies, self-deceptions, and honorable hearts of her characters.” —The New Yorker

“Schine sets the Austen machinery in perfect forward motion, and then works some lovely modern changes, keeping the pace going at a lively clip . . . Spotting the similarities and differences between the early 19th century and early 21st century stories is good sport, but the greater pleasure comes from Schine’s own clever girls and their awkward attempts to find happiness.” —The Boston Globe

“There is so much zest for life in this novel that you can only imagine how much fun Cathleen Schine had writing it.” —Carol Memmott, USA Today

“Absolutely wonderful. You’ll turn each page with anticipation, all the while wishing you could read it slowly in order to savor the deliciousness of Schine’s particular sensibility….It will warm the center of your heart.” —Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge

“Swap genteel nineteenth-century England for upscale contemporary Connecticut, add two sisters—one impulsive, one practical—and stir with lively doses of romance, domestic discord, sudden setbacks, and sublime surprises, and you get Cathleen Schine’s homage to Jane Austen.” —Elle

“No Cathleen Schine book is without wit and sharply observed moments.” —The Wall Street Journal

"A geriatric stepfather falls in love with a scheming woman half his age in Schine's Sense and Sensibility–flecked and compulsively readable follow-up to The New Yorkers. Betty Weissman is 75 when Joseph, her husband of nearly 50 years, announces he's divorcing her. Soon, Betty moves out of their grand Central Park West apartment and Joseph's conniving girlfriend, Felicity, moves in. Betty lands in a rundown Westport, Conn., beach cottage, but things quickly get more complicated when Betty's daughters run into their own problems. Literary agent Miranda is sued into bankruptcy after it's revealed that some of her authors made up their lurid memoirs, and Annie, drowning in debt, can no longer afford her apartment. Once they relocate to Westport, both girls fall in love—Annie rather awkwardly with the brother of her stepfather's paramour, and Miranda with a younger actor who has a young son. An Austen-esque mischief hovers over these romantic relationships as the three women figure out how to survive and thrive. It's a smart crowd pleaser with lovably flawed leads and the best tearjerker finale you're likely to read this year." —Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly

A geriatric stepfather falls in love with a scheming woman half his age in Schine's Sense and Sensibility–flecked and compulsively readable follow-up to The New Yorkers. Betty Weissman is 75 when Joseph, her husband of nearly 50 years, announces he's divorcing her. Soon, Betty moves out of their grand Central Park West apartment and Joseph's conniving girlfriend, Felicity, moves in. Betty lands in a rundown Westport, Conn., beach cottage, but things quickly get more complicated when Betty's daughters run into their own problems. Literary agent Miranda is sued into bankruptcy after it's revealed that some of her authors made up their lurid memoirs, and Annie, drowning in debt, can no longer afford her apartment. Once they relocate to Westport, both girls fall in love—Annie rather awkwardly with the brother of her stepfather's paramour, and Miranda with a younger actor who has a young son. An Austen-esque mischief hovers over these romantic relationships as the three women figure out how to survive and thrive. It's a smart crowd pleaser with lovably flawed leads and the best tearjerker finale you're likely to read this year. (Feb.)

Dominique Browning

…sparkling, crisp, clever, deft, hilarious and deeply affecting…her best yet…Schine's homage has it all: stinging social satire, mordant wit, delicate charm, lilting language and cosseting materialistic detail.
—The New York Times

The New York Times Book Review

Schine gives her characters more than their fair share of luck, but she is also brave enough to let them wrestle with raw fear. Among its many gifts to the dearest sort of reader, a fully engaged one, 'The Three Weissmanns of Westport' offers the chance for a mediation on that snake of Emily Dickinson's as it slithers through the grass-the snake that sometimes startles and frightens us, so undefended and unprepared are we, caught in our 'tighter breathing, and zero at the bone.'
—Dominique Browning

Booklist

It may be hard to envision a novel of manners set in our ill-mannered times, but accomplished author Schine has captured the essence ofSense and Sensibility and dropped it into today's Manhattan and Westport. The Weissmanns, elderly mother and two mature daughters driven to penury by divorce and career reversals, must rely on the beneficence of Cousin Lou for the shabby roof over their heads. Annie, still modestly employed as a librarian, has both salary and an apartment to sublet, so it falls to her to provide the income for the three. Alas,the other two spend money as if it were still the old days. Mother Betty affects widowhood as it is easier than the pending divorce. Sister Miranda finds inappropriate love. The wide-ranging cast of characters--fools, scoundrels, poseurs, the good-hearted, and secret heroes--provides interesting interplay. Wild coincidences abound, so that Manhattan, Westport, and Palm Springs are but mere extensions of the classic drawing room. There is sadness but also love in this thoroughlyenjoyable, finely crafted modern novel.
—Danise Hoover

Library Journal

Drawing on Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Schine (The New Yorkers) has written a witty update in which a late-life divorce exiles Betty Weissmann and her adult daughters, Annie and Miranda, from a luxurious life in New York to a shabby beach cottage in Westport, CT. Annie is the serious daughter and Miranda the drama queen. Both women find unexpected love, while Betty, a sweet, frivolous spendthrift, struggles with her newly impoverished state. What comfort the Weissmanns enjoy is owing to the generosity of Cousin Lou, a Holocaust survivor and real-estate mogul, whose goal in life is to rescue everyone, whether or not rescue is needed. While beautifully preserving the essence of the plot, Schine skillfully manages to parallel the original novel in clever 21st-century ways—the trip to London becomes a holiday in Palm Springs; the scoundrel Willoughby becomes a wannabe actor. VERDICT Austen lovers and those who enjoyed updates like Paula Marantz Cohen's Jane Austen in Boca and Jane Austen in Scarsdale should appreciate this novel. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/09.]—Andrea Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS

Kirkus Reviews

Already recognized for her own witty romantic comedies of manners, Schine (The New Yorkers, 2008, etc.) joins the onslaught of Austen imitators. Upper-middle-class, mostly Jewish New Yorkers take the place of British gentry in this Sense and Sensibility riff. After 48 years of marriage, 78-year-old Joseph Weissman leaves his 75-year-old wife Betty for Felicity Barrow, a younger woman with whom he works. Although Josie (as his stepdaughters call him) repeatedly swears he wants to be generous to Betty, Felicity manipulates him into closing Betty's credit-card accounts and forcing her out of the Weissmans' Upper West Side apartment she herself paid for decades ago. Fortunately, kindly Cousin Lou lends Betty his abandoned cottage in Westport, Conn., and Betty's daughters, outraged on their mother's behalf although they don't stop loving Josie, move in with her. Romantic, never married but often in love, 49-year-old Miranda is in dire financial straits herself, as scandals concerning the memoirists she represents threaten to bankrupt her literary agency. Sensible Annie, briefly married and long divorced, has successfully raised two sons while working at a privately endowed library. Now living in stoic loneliness, she has begun to fall in love with famous author Frederick Barrow, who happens to be Felicity's brother and whose grown offspring jealously guard his affections. In Westport, Annie is hurt when Frederick practically ignores her at a gathering at Cousin Lou's. Meanwhile, Miranda has an affair with the handsome young actor next door and falls seriously in love with his two-year-old son. Feisty Betty begins to refer to herself as a widow. In true Austen fashion, love and money conquerall, although Schine adds some modern sorrow and a slightly off-putting disdain for her male characters, who range from narcissistically foolish to, in what passes for the romantic hero, pragmatic and unoffending. Infectious fun, but the tweaked version never quite lives up to the original.

Publishers Weekly

Schine's Austenesque novel of manners translates delightfully to audio, thanks to the witty, character-centric writing and Hillary Huber's empathetic narration. Huber's nuanced performance makes the listener feel for elderly, abandoned Betty and her two beleaguered daughters, and the creative character voices (ranging from frail Betty and Yiddish-accented Cousin Lou to Valley Girl Amber, snippy Felicity, and adorable three-year-old Henry) brings the colorful cast to vivid life. Best of all, as expressive as she is, Huber is never histrionic: even when selfish characters like gold digger Felicity present their points of view, Huber plays it straight, allowing the characters' patently self-serving words to speak for themselves and the listener to judge them, resisting the urge to overplay the obvious hypocrisy. This audio is a pleasure to listen to—a perfect marriage of novel and narrator. A Farrar, Straus & Giroux hardcover (Reviews, Dec. 21). (Mar.)

The Barnes & Noble Review

Here are some of the things Cathleen Schine makes fun of in The Three Weissmanns of Westport, her sparkling homage to Sense and Sensibility: men trading in their old wives for newer models; divorce lawyers; author tours and readings; fallout from the rash of fraudulent memoirs; Westport, Connecticut; McMansions; infomercials and daytime television; pomposity; people who incessantly quote Shakespeare; and self-deluding notions of fairness and generosity.

Schine is a master of the modern domestic comedy. Her novels, distinguished by keen intelligence, sharp wit, and, more often than not, an underpinning in the classics, are light yet not without weight, effervescent yet tethered by solid thought and feeling. She's more intellectually inclined than Elinor Lipman but no less delightful. In Rameau's Niece (1993), she anchored a satire of academics, New York intelligentsia, and issues of confused sexuality with a pastiche of Diderot and an erotic 18^th-century manuscript. In The Evolution of Jane(1998), set in the Galapagos, she applied Darwinian theory to transmutations in close female friendships. She Is Me (2003) refracts a story of three generations of women coping with love, illness, and grief through Flaubert's Madame Bovary.

And now, with her eighth novel, she goes directly for the mother ship, the oft-imitated but never equaled Jane Austen. Why? Because Jane Austen is irresistible. Because you write the book you want to read. Because why let Paula Marantz Cohen have all the fun with Jane Austen in Boca, her recasting of Pride and Prejudice with Florida widows, orJane Austen in Scarsdale, her transposition of Persuasion to college admissions in Westchester county?

So, another (at least nominally) Jewish twist on Austen. The alluringly alliterative The Three Weissmanns of Westport is actually Schine's second novel set in the wealthy coastal suburb; the pink bookstore of The Love Letter(1995) was based on her hometown's late lamented, aptly named Remarkable Book Shop.

Schine's new novel opens with Austenian directness. Instead of primogeniture, divorce is the disrupter that abruptly changes a family's -- and especially a woman's--circumstances. When Joseph Weissmann, 78, tells his wife of 48 years that he wants a divorce because of "irreconcilable differences," 75-year-old Betty says, "Irreconcilable differences? Of course there are irreconcilable differences. What on earth does that have to do with divorce?" A bit more sparring, and we learn that "The name of Joe's irreconcilable difference was Felicity, although Betty referred to her, pretending she could not remember the correct name, sometimes as Pleurisy, more often as Duplicity."

When Joe says, "I want to be generous," Betty rightly takes umbrage. "Generous? she thought. It was as if she were the maid and was being fired. Would he offer her two months' salary?" She tells him, "You cannot be generous with what is mine." Schine clinches the exchange: "And the divorce, like horses in a muddy race, their sides frothing, was off and running."

And so, of course, is Schine's novel. Just as Sense and Sensibility's John Dashwood is convinced by his selfish wife to dislodge his stepmother and three stepsisters from Norland Park despite deathbed promises to his father that he would provide for them, Joseph Weissmann is convinced by his tough new paramour, Felicity, that the Weissmanns' large, gracious Central Park West apartment is rightly his and that he shouldn't burden Betty with its upkeep or the onerous taxes that would result from its sale.

With her credit cards canceled and no funds until the divorce is settled, Betty relies, like Austen's displaced Dashwoods, on the kindness of friends and relatives. She retreats, heartsick, to a rundown cottage on Westport's Compo Beach slated for teardown. Her two middle-aged daughters accompany her for solidarity. Their benefactor is Cousin Lou, a successful real estate developer -- but not an entirely successful character -- who's never forgotten his origins as a W.W.II refugee. Annie Weissmann is the practical member of the trio, the family worrier, a long divorced librarian with two grown sons. Forty-nine-year-old Miranda, too inconstant in her emotions to have ever married, is a literary agent wed, in a sense, to her demanding "Awful Authors." When it turns out that several of the memoirs she championed were fabricated -- "fake cheesy lurid tragedy" -- Miranda is vilified by the literary world and disgraced on Oprah.

Schine pokes fun at "sororal rage" and family dynamics revived from childhood as the three women cope with their new "genteel poverty" and meet potential suitors at magnanimous Cousin Lou's weekly dinner parties. Miranda spurns the steady, quiet, semi-retired lawyer -- Schine's stand-in for Austen's Colonel Brandon -- instead falling in love with several unlikely candidates, and in the process discovering her inner nanny. One thing the author holds sacred is maternity. She writes, "No wonder people had children, [Miranda] thought. A child replaced art and work and culture." When Annie's sons turn up to brighten an otherwise dismal Thanksgiving, "Annie was so happy she felt ill." But she registers sadness and resignation at the knowledge that, "though they would always be at the center of her life, she was no longer at the center of theirs."

The novel is filled with zingers and riffs you can't resist reading aloud -- lines like "He was an actor, so he never had any work." There are plenty of serious aperçus, as well. After being advised to hire a shark lawyer and a forensic accountant, Betty, newly taken during her "cottage arrest" with daytime television, observes, "A divorce was surely a kind of death: a murder, in fact. It was the memories, so stubbornly happy and lifeless and useless, stinking with decay, that lay in a putrid heap like a rotting corpse."

As with Austen, the anticipation -- even after multiple readings -- of the pieces falling neatly into place is enormously satisfying, somewhat akin to the progression toward the harmonious resolution of a Bach Invention. I don't recall ever shedding a tear when reading Sense and Sensibility, but I cried at the end of Schine's novel. It's not easy to be both funny and moving, and to write a conclusion that is both happy and sad. Schine pulls it off. This is a book I'll urge on friends.

--Heller McAlpin