Perfect Together

Fran and Charlie's almost perfect yuppie marriage is threatened when, following futile attempts to conceive a baby, their maid becomes pregnant, and Charlie, admitting paternity, declares his intentions to raise the child

It all started, Fran tells her psychiatrist in this brisk comedy of errors, when she and her husband, Charlie, two driven, sophisticated New York City professionals on the fast track, moved to suburban Rivertown. Fran and Charlie are the perfect couple except for one thing--now that they want a baby, they can't seem to conceive one. So they set up the perfect suburban life, complete with maid. But Fran doesn't get pregnant, the maid does--with Charlie's baby. He and Fran decide to adopt the child, generating an ironic saga of social mores. With a breezy pace and rapid (sometimes too rapid) shifts between humor and calamity, the novel demonstrates that life doesn't always turn out the way you plan. Johnson ( The World of Henry Orient ; The Two of Us ) creates an appealing cast of characters; some (like Fran and her sparkling mother, Lulu) more sharply drawn than others, but all lively. Her writing polished and packed with visual, animated language, Johnson successfully avoids sounding like a TV movie on yuppies who have waited too long to have children. Her narrative swiftly careens toward tragedy and an uplifting denouement, but unfortunately it lacks the depth that would make the story truly moving.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A sophisticated, naughty tale of a fast-track lawyer's near collapse when her husband sires a child with their spaced-out maid- -told with liberal doses of cynicism and dark-side humor by the author of Uncharted Places (1988), Tender Offer (1986), etc. It was a perfect New York marriage: Fran, the petite European- bred sophisticate, a divorce lawyer with a boyish bob and excellent taste in home decoration, and Charlie, her dreamy physicist husband from the stolid depths of Ohio. Perfect, at least, until they had to go and ruin it all by giving up their rent-controlled apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side and spontaneously moving to the suburbs. The obvious next step? A baby, of course. But Fran, nearing 40, proves unable to conceive. As the burdens of faulty water-heaters and commuter train schedules begin to weigh tiresomely on the couple's well-upholstered shoulders, Charlie's eye begins to stray toward the kitchen, where Ellie, the scattered but obviously fertile Irish-American maid and mother of two, is haphazardly washing dishes. Before they know it, Ellie's pregnant, and when Charlie proves so proud of his lineage that he begs Fran to join with him and adopt the child, the roof blows off their cozy coexistence. Careers, cherished personal philosophies, and simple decorum go flying out the window as Ellie runs off with her spiritual counselor, Charlie turns househusband and father, and a bitterly resentful Fran hits the rush-hour traffic to support her husband and a child she doesn't love. Before this battle ends, everyone's lives will have been turned inside out a number of times, and Fran will have ended up with both more and less than she ever bargained for. A breath of fresh air in the often sentimental mommy-book genre. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Fran and Charlie are the quintessential rich Yuppie couple. They have a house in the suburbs of New York City with a gardener and a housekeeper. They vacation in Italy, visiting her mother. The only thing that is missing is the perfect Yuppie baby. When the housekeeper gets pregnant with Charlie's child, they decide to adopt the baby. From here on, however, the story becomes farfetched. The housekeeper runs off with the child to a religious cult retreat. They finally get the baby back, and then Charlie becomes obsessed with it, quitting his job to care for the child. This novel is a perfect example of melodrama, defined in Webster 's as "a drama with exaggerated conflicts and emotions, stereotyped characters, etc." Johnson, daughter of screenwriter/producer Nunnally Johnson, has garnered some acclaim with previous novels, such as Uncharted Places ( 10/15/88) and The World of Henry Orient , but this novel misses the mark.
- Kathy Armendt Sorci, IIT Research Inst., Annapolis, Md.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.