Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

March 14, 2016
The 1970s and ’60s are reexamined in Ausubel’s second novel, which takes place largely in the American bicentennial year of 1976. Coming from moneyed backgrounds, married couple Edgar and Fern Keating react in a surprising fashion to their impending insolvency. Edgar, a soon-to-be-published novelist, goes sailing off to Bermuda with a woman he just slept with named Glory Jefferson. And Fern embarks on a cross-country road trip from Cambridge to Palm Springs with Mac, a giant bank guard she just met. Due to a mix-up, the Keatings’ three resilient children, nine-year-old Cricket and the 6-year-old twins, James and Will, are left home alone. Interspersed with this narrative are numerous flashbacks to the late ’60s, as we see Edgar and Fern meeting, courting, marrying, and having children as the world seemingly goes to hell around them. Ausubel (No One Is Here Except All of Us) offers an incisive look at these schismatic years in American history and how they affect this couple and their friends and family members, including Fern’s twin brother, Ben, who is drafted into the army along with Edgar. There is true wit in the author’s depiction of these tumultuous decades, and with characters this memorable, the pages almost turn themselves. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

March 15, 2016
Fortunes and hearts are lost and found in a modern fairy tale set in the 1960s and '70s. Ausubel's (A Guide to Being Born, 2013, etc.) trademark combination of realist narrative with fabulist elements shines in this novel that includes everything from Vietnam War casualties and a West Virginia mine disaster to a road trip with a giant, an escape by sailboat, and children on their own in a wood. It begins on Labor Day weekend, 1976, at the summer house of Fern and Edgar Keating and their three children. Fern receives a call from her family lawyer that not a penny is left of the fortune she was to inherit from her recently deceased parents. And while Edgar could "go back and take over the family steel company in Chicago...[i]t was the very last thing he wanted to do. He would not be able to publish the novel he had spent ten years writing because it was about the son of a steel baron who walks away from his father's money." This is a first-world problem to be sure, but it rocks the Keatings' world. Edgar wanders off to a pot party and gets way too involved with a louche woman in white bell-bottoms named Glory. Meanwhile, Fern is inveigled into playing the bride in a fake wedding put on to entertain Alzheimer's patients in a nursing home, then takes off for California with her groom, who is literally a giant. Both Fern and Edgar leave town thinking the other is still at home--but in fact, their kids are all alone, with only fourth-grader Cricket to take care of her kindergarten-age twin brothers. Interwoven with this '70s story are sections set in 1965, filling in marvelous detail about Fern's and Edgar's parents, the early days of their love, and the fate of Fern's own adored twin. Ausubel's magical, engrossing prose style perfectly fits this magical, engrossing story.

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May 1, 2016
Fern comes from old money, Edgar from new. They marry young in 1966 and start a life of ease: Edgar a fledgling novelist, Fern a mother, of Cricket (born when draftee Edgar is in Alaska, writing letters to loved ones of servicemen who died in Vietnam) and twins Will and James. That life ends on Edgar's 32nd birthday in 1976, when Fern learns there's no money left after her parents' recent deaths. Edgar, faced with the appalling prospect of joining his father's steel company, opts for a new life, taking a lover (then offering Fern to his lover's husband) with whom he sets sail for Mexico. Fern, furious, joins a man she's just met to drive across the country. Neither knows the other is gone, leaving nine-year-old Cricket and the kindergartner twins alone. As the narrative moves between 1966, 1967, and 1976, Ausubel considers the historical plight of Native Americans and the legacy of slavery on wealth. Known for her fabulist fiction (No One Is Here Except All of Us, 2012), Ausubel offers a piercing view of the subtleties of class and privilege and what happens when things go awry.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)