WHEN WE GET HOME

After seeing her father go through three divorces and her brother fall in love with their father's newest wife, Annie decides she must reexamine her own approach to committment

This debut novel about a young woman whose much-divorced parents have left her with no talent for commitment (but with a wistful desire for it, nonetheless) is written in such a fashionably passionless style that it's often hard to care what comes next. Annie drifts first into marriage and then into a series of affairs; her husband has a nervous breakdown and her brother sleeps with their father's beautiful young wife. Meanwhile, the reader wonders why any of this had to happen--or had to be presented so dispiritedly. By the end, Annie has learned a few old-fashioned lessons about the endurance of love and the need to connect, but even this development seems fairly arbitrary here--the very act of determining what matters doesn't seem to matter much, given Markson's tepid prose and her refusal to utilize a genuine gift for humor to animate and enrich these characters. As it is, their deliberate quirkiness doesn't compensate for their lack of depth; the elliptical, hip exchanges between them, apparently meant to suggest intimacy, are a poor substitute.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This is the story of Annie, a woman in her twenties who searches for a secure familial environment, having grown up in a family that was never stable. The novel follows her life from marriage though extramarital affairs and separation to reconciliation. While this scenario may seem of potential interest, both the plot and characters, including Annie herself, fail to engage. As Annie's problems (e.g., boredom as a housewife in her Connecticut mansion) appear more and more to be the product of socioeconomic privilege, they become less and less interesting. The plot meanders so aimlessly and arbitrarily from trivial domestic incident to major family catastrophe that one begins to react to each twist and turn with complete indifference. This first novel will not leave its readers eagerly awaiting seconds.
- Julia Duffy, CUNY Graduate Sch. Lib.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.