One Sunday Morning

This is a wonderful new novel from Amy Ephron, it delightfully captures the decadent mood of twenties New York. Ephron easily shows the hypocrisy as well as the fun of the time with free flowing alcohol despite prohibition and party girls staying up all night. Although this is not a long story the characters are well formed and interesting. This is the perfect novel to read on a lazy Summer afternoon. I can't wait for her next offering.

One Sunday Morning like Amy Epron's earlier book A Cup of Tea provides readers with a look at society life from many years ago. This is a way too short book which enveloped me from the very first page. The sighting of an innocent woman leaving a hotel one Sunday morning sets off a chain of events and false perceptions in the days before the Depression no one could have predicted. Evoking the era of the Jazz age and those heady days of Jay Gatsby, it as if Edith Wharton met the women from Sex and the City. When it comes to historical fiction and the pulse of Manhattan society in those days, nobody does it better than Amy Ephron. I highly recommend this book and look forward to this talented author's next book.

I found this book on the table of the bookstore and finished it within a span of two days. I loved it! It's about socialites in the 1920s in New York, and they take a trip to Paris. It's very minimalistic and great. I love the scenes set in Paris. There's a fabulous scene where one of the girls walks the Champs-Elysee and I swear I almost cried. It's like I know the girls. Even though it's the 1920s, I found so many comparisons to today's culture, the way that today we're up against a conservative backlash in the country not unlike prohibition and the way that people still talk behind each other's backs, and the way that things aren't always as they seem. Highly recommend this book!!

While hardly the heady stuff of Edith Wharton, this charming novella (it's really too brief to be classified as a novel) is perfect summer reading. The female characters are precisely drawn though I could wish she'd opted for more depth and a more lengthy story. All in all, very enjoyable -- takes no more than a couple of hours to read!

If Edith Wharton were alive and writing now, who would she be? Dominick Dunne is the first novelist who comes to mind, especially his first few novels. But Dunne's books are, more often than not, jump-started by a crime; for Wharton, a social gaffe was sufficient to fuel a plot. And Wharton's books were rich in subplots and subtext. You could, I think, make the case that Amy Ephron is our Wharton. This seems, on the surface, improbable. Ephron lives in Los Angeles, where roots do not run deep and Society goes back only a handful of generations. She has worked --- gasp --- in the movie business, where people with a provenance rarely venture. And she writes novels that are painfully short: ONE SUNDAY MORNING runs to 214 pages only because the book is small and the margins are vast. What Ephron shares with Wharton: Her books are not so much written as carved. Every word counts. And, like Wharton, every word is about the story --- there are no digressions, no riding of an authorial hobbyhorse. And, like Wharton, Ephron is concerned how a small event can be inflated into a large one. In ONE SUNDAY MORNING, the event is a view from the window of a Gramercy Park townhouse: young Lizzie Carswell leaving a hotel in broad daylight with Billy Holmes, a man engaged to one of her friends. Lizzie's mother had to go abroad because of a scandal; have mom's degenerate genes been passed on? And what will Clara Hart, Billy's intended, do when she hears the news (as she most assuredly will)? Wharton material, to be sure. But there's a tension here you wouldn't find in a Wharton novel --- the story is set in 1927, and so, very much bubbling under the Society plot, is the reckless mood of that era. Alcohol. Drugs. Homosexuality. These add a Fitzgeraldian spice to the strict moral tale that is Ephron's legacy from Wharton. And, just in case you're nostalgic for Somerset Maugham, there's a man just back from very interesting travels in Asia. Maybe he's a lost soul. Maybe he's a potential suitor. This isn't to say that Amy Ephron has cherrypicked her influences (though if she did, she couldn't have done better). You read this book for itself, and for the precise portraits she draws. Sample: "Clara was nursing a gin and tonic. She had a Piaget watch on her right wrist that Billy had picked up for her at an antique store. It had a simple black band and a plain gold rim around its face so the numbers themselves were the set-piece, distinctly Piaget. Billy's linen suit was appropriately wrinkled. It occurred to Mary that they fit into Paris in a way that she never would." Mary will, of course, get a big surprise. So will the other characters. It turns out that quite a lot can happen in 214 pages --- that is, when the writer is a master storyteller like Amy Ephron. --- Reviewed by Jesse Kornbluth