Fiction: The View from Penthouse B

Elinor Lipman is an acquired taste; her characters are likable, ordinary, sometimes boring, and in The View from Penthouse B her focus on three sisters once again reveals how everyday connections can take the mundane to the universal. Although the focus is the widowed middle sister, Gwen-Laura, who moves into her older sister’s new York penthouse apartment, a cast of characters quickly manage to overwhelm the slow-moving story.

Recognizable contemporary issues drive the action: older sister Margot has lost all her money in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme; her husband, a famous medical doctor is in jail for having sex with his patients; a new gay roommate bakes cupcakes after losing his job at Lehman Brothers; Gwen looks to online dating to find a new life. Sometimes working like a slow Marx Brothers movie, the angles intersect humorously and without much rancor. Although I am a Lipman fan, I found myself falling asleep reading this book – in the middle of the day. If you need fast-paced thrills, this is not for you, but as comfort food for the soul, Lipman’s style is a reminder of the possibility that life can always get better.

Nonfiction: I Can’t Complain

Lipman’s book of short essays – I Can’t Complain – arrived from the library with her novel. The collection draws from Lipman’s experiences, with the last essay neatly summarizing the plot of her new novel, noting parallels to Lipman’s life after the untimely death of her husband.

I liked this collection of real stories better than the fictionalized version.

One of my favorite books is Berg’s collection of essays that opens with The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted; the same deprecating humor and memorable lines flow through I Can’t Complain. Somehow, Elinor Lipman channeled my mother, my attitudes, sometimes my secret fears – but then Lipman prides herself in connecting to Everyman in her novels of manners – so maybe we all are like that?

On Holding a Grudge:

Upon meeting me you’d find me pleasant, reasonable, and without question, nice…But let me step aside and introduce the inner child…who very much likes to hold a grudge…My personal trepsverter (Yiddish expression meaning ‘perfect retort’) is the tape in my head, always cued up, of the dialogue I might have voiced if life were a soap opera, where good characters scold the bad characters, and the bad characters stand still long enough to hear it.

Real life rarely presents those opportunities. If I find myself in the company of someone who slighted me in, say, 1986, and I excavate the old insult, my conviction, and my voice soon fade: this villain remembers neither the conversation, the context, nor me.”

On Trying to Impress One’s Mother:

“…{at a} book group luncheon. I tried to be winning and entertaining so she could see me in action and be proud. I talked my heart out. She smiled and nodded regally from her chair at the head table… As soon as we got in the car, I asked,”So? What’d you think?” She smiled, patted her own shoulder pads. “I think this suit was a very good choice for this event, don’t you?”

Another review on a Lipman book: The Family Man