Marrying Mom - Hardcover

Goldsmith, Olivia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060186526 ISBN 13: 9780060186524

Publisher: Harpercollins, 1996

Synopsis

Panic erupts among the grown children of Phyllis Geronomous when their difficult mother announces that she is leaving Florida to move north, and they set out in search of an ailing, wealthy old man with no family of his own to take their mother off theirhands

About this title

Reviews

Goldsmith has hit a triple: in addition to the movie based on The First Wives Club and her recent novel, Bestseller, bruiting her name, she will have this funny, schmaltzy fairytale-cum-sitcom in the stores in time for the holidays. "Mom" is Phyllis Geronomus, a wisecracking 69-year-old widow who decides to leave Florida and return to Manhattan to help her grown children make something of their lives. The trouble is that her kids greet her arrival as they would a plague of locusts. Stockbroker Sigourney, nee Susan, unmarried at 40, has a sagging client list and is about to lose her elegant apartment overlooking Central Park. Entrepreneur Bruce, now out of the closet, fears his line of gay greeting cards is about to expire. Obese Sharon is married to a chronically unemployed loser. Domineering Mom will surely drive each of them over the edge. Their solution: to give Phyllis a makeover and a shopping session at Bergdorfs, put her up at the Pierre and take her to a charity ball where she can meet a rich old geezer who will both marry her and save her kids from financial ruin. The premise is pure TV farce, fueled by Goldsmith's clever dialogue and acerbic one-liners. Her takes on the relationships between parents (especially Jewish parents) and their children, and between the bickering siblings themselves, are on-target. Through events that escalate from the ridiculous to the preposterous, Goldsmith steers the principals to an ultra-happy ending and an inescapable conclusion: all families are dysfunctional, but every dysfunctional family is wacky in its own way. $175,000 ad/promo; film rights to Paramount.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Goldsmith follows The Bestseller (p. 768) with a light, contrived romance about a Jewish mother and her three unsettled children. Mom is Phyllis Geronomous (n‚e Phyllis Steen, so Geronomous seems a big improvement), and she lives in South Florida. While at 69, she's no longer young, she finds little appealing about the lifestyle of her many elderly neighbors, who restlessly patrol the local boardwalk and look forward only to early-bird dinners at the Rascal House. Dedicated to finding something a little less terminal, Phyllis bids farewell to her dead husband Ira at the cemetery--he doesn't answer, but he never said a lot when he was alive either--and returns to New York City to get into the hair of her unhappy children: Sigourney (n‚e Susan), a 40ish stockbroker whose business and love life are falling apart; gay Bruce, whose ``Queer Santa'' greeting-card line is failing and whose lover won't commit to marriage; and fat, whiny Sharon, whose husband Barney is a deadbeat. Guilty because she never had time to go to PTA meetings, Phyllis now wants to fix their lives. At the same time, they want her out of their hair and back with the palm trees. So, the three launch Operation Geezer Quest to find Phyllis a rich husband, complete with a Bergdorf Goodman makeover and a suite at the Pierre. Along the way, with enough Yiddish for a whole season of The Nanny, Phyllis doles out tough love and wise words. Finally, everyone's life is improved, and Mom begins her eighth decade with good sex, a large sapphire ring, and an offshore bank account in the Caymans. Some laughs and refreshing senior-citizen romance, but more like the outline for a TV sitcom than a novel. (Film rights to Paramount; Literary Guild Selection; $175,000 ad/promo; TV and radio satellite tours) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

You can't expect authors to come up with a hit every time. You also wouldn't expect utter nonsense after such a well-researched, full-bodied novel as The Bestseller. It seems that HarperCollins pushed Goldsmith to complete her next novel so that its release would coincide with the release of the movie First Wives Club, adapted from her 1992 novel. Marrying Mom features saucy Phyllis, a retired New Yorker living in Miami, bored out of her wits now that her husband Ira has passed on--not that he was any barrel of laughs, as Phyllis continually points out. When she announces that she's moving back to New York to be with her three children, she purposely does not tell them because she knows how little she is missed. She wants to make up for the lack of attention she gave them when they were young. Poor mothering skills should not be blamed for creating these three whiny brats, though. Sig is lonely and living extravagantly on dwindling resources, Bruce is a gay man with bad business sense who cannot forgive his mother for anything, and Sharon is fat and miserable with two bratty kids and a lazy husband. There is really no one to like here, except perhaps the old guys the kids continually try to fix up with their mother. Mary Frances Wilkens

Edition details

• Publisher: Harpercollins
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060186526
• ISBN 13: 9780060186524
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 207