The Housewife Blues

This book starts out a tad slow but don't let that turn you away - Adler is setting up a little background on each of the characters that inhabit the apartment building and it's well worth it as the story progresses. Rarely do I find an author able to write from so many different characters' perspectives (5? 6?) and still keep my interest. Jenny, the main character (and housewife of the title) is delightful: at times you want to cuff her (gently) upside the head and other times you feel like jumping up and down to root her on. (Which is, of course, the mark of an engaging character!) Adler does an especially good job of Jenny's gradual transformation and "coming into her own." (You gotta wonder how a MAN can put himself in the head of a housewife...) Larry is a piece of work - I enjoyed an intense dislike for him! And I won't spoil the ending, but I will say it was quite satisfying!

Jenny, traditional small-town Hoosier girl, meets Larry, Manhattan go-getter adman. He wants a loving helpmate, she wants a man to nurture. It's a match made in old-fashioned heaven. As wickedly funny, if not as wicked, as his earlier "The War of the Roses," Adler's "The Housewife Blues" is a classically choreographed comedy of manners. The story, seen primarily through Jenny's eyes, takes place in the small New York apartment building where she spends her days. Larry, a shark of the new school, warns Jenny against her neighborly inclinations. But Jenny can't help but take an interest in the attractive couple upstairs, inviting them to a down-home dinner which makes Larry writhe in embarrassment and does not elicit a return invitation. And she can't turn a blind eye to the glum couple whose teenage son secretly visits the gay couple in the basement. Being home all day it's only natural she would accept a package for the brittle career-woman with the clandestine weekend lover or look after the gay couple's errant cat, or offer tea and cookies to the teenager when he loses his keys. Quickly enmeshed in their lives, Jenny keeps more of her activities from Larry while worrying over his big career move. Appalled and touched to discover that hard-nosed New Yorkers, given half a drop of encouragement, are a lot less reticent about their private affairs than the staid folks back home, she lends a squeamish ear and a generous heart. Then, at a painfully funny dinner party, Jenny learns more than she wants to know about her Larry. Her coming-of-age is fraught with struggles to keep her comfortable illusions while rationalizing her own secret life. Adler's style is straightforward and understated, his humor and observation no less sharp for being laconically delivered. Jenny is a delightful character whose plunge into life is wholeheartedly based on optimistic homilies like "People are people everywhere." And if Larry is little more than a cut-out, he seems the sort of handsome mistake a young, naively ambitious girl could make. Portsmouth Herald