Alvah's Books

The Season of Second Chances: A Novel
By Diane Meier
Henry Holt and Company
304 pages
List Price: $25; Amazon Price: $16.50

[Editor's note: Review written for Dan's Papers]

If you’re in the market to remodel your home and need interior decorating ideas, Diane Meier’s The Season of Second Chances might be the book for you.

Schlubby and reserved, Columbia University English literature Professor Joy Harkness is not a happy woman. Readers learn via Joy’s narration that life in New York City and teaching at an Ivy League school has been a disappointment. When she is offered a prestigious and lucrative teaching position at Amherst College, Joy immediately accepts to be part of a group of progressive instructors who are developing an exciting new method of interdisciplinary teaching.

With her new job offer in hand, Joy sells her cramped Riverside Drive apartment, moves to western Massachusetts, and buys a rundown Victorian house that needs a major overhaul both inside and out. To help with the renovation, Joy hires Teddy Hennessy, a talented, but developmentally delayed handyman who is an expert on 19th century architecture, interior design and décor, and who later becomes Joy’s lover.

As the renovation of the house beautifully progresses, Joy also goes through her own transformation; she becomes less introverted and socializes more than she has in years, and grudgingly acknowledges the emotional benefits of friendship. However, in spite of the positive changes in her life, Joy feels on many occasions put upon by her new-found friends’ personal predicaments.

Meier wonderfully portrays Joy as woman who is an intellectual snob, but who is also angry, negative, and guarded. It’s these traits that easily put off the reader, but Meier skillfully softens Joy with humor and insight, and it’s in her moments of concern over Teddy’s potential future and his well-being that one finally warms up to Joy.

However, readers will have to suspend disbelief when it comes to the character of Teddy Hennessy, the man-child handyman who is enslaved by his widowed mother’s narcissistic needs, but who has a flair with paint, wall paper, and wiring. Teddy is an architectural genius with keen eye for detail and refined taste in décor. Yet what Teddy lacks is the maturity of a grown man, and Meier adds adolescent clichés to the character from the way he speaks to the way he dresses. Although Joy and Teddy are the primary characters, it’s the ramshackle Victorian that steals the story with it glorious renaissance. Meier lovingly illustrates Teddy’s sense of style:

He painted the little room sage green with the same creamy white paint on the trim and wainscoting that ran through the rest of the house. He hung a plain craft-paper window shade on the one long window and painted the shade’s bottom hem and irregular line of daubed-on sage green dots. An old wooden desk chair from a consignment shop was painted green … On the far side of the room sat my old bookshelves, now divided into four sections chair-rail high; Teddy had screwed them together, added a top and some moldings, and painted them the same color as the wainscoting behind them.

It’s in these descriptive scenes of home décor in which Meier truly shines, and perhaps it should come as no surprise because the author is the founder of a New York City marketing firm whose clients have included luxury icons such as Limoges China, Orrefors Crystal, and Neiman Marcus.

The heart of The Season of Second Chances is that it’s never too late to build a strong and lasting foundation among the people you’ve come to trust and love. It takes Joy several months to learn this important lesson and when she receives the symbolic whack on the side of her head, she finally grasps the need to change her attitude and that friendship has much to offer, or as she’s told, “there’s the family you’re born with and then there is the family you choose.” Good advice to take to heart-with some decorating tips.

Twelve Rooms with a View: A Novel
by Theresa Rebeca
Shaye Areheart Books
335 pages
List Price: $24.99; Amazon Price: $16.49

[Ed note: I recently started a weekly book review column in Dan's Paper's. I'll post my review here as a well.]

New York City apartment owners might recognize their neighbors, co-op board members, or even themselves in Twelve Rooms with a View, the second novel by playwright and screenwriter Theresa Rebeck, who takes a vicious, but amusing look at Manhattan’s cutthroat real estate market.

Narrated by the main character, Tina Finn, Twelve Rooms opens at a funeral where Tina and her sisters, Lucy and Alison, suddenly discover they’ve inherited from their alcoholic mother the famous 12-room Livingston Mansion Apartment (supposedly valued at $11 million) located at the historic Edgewood Building on the Upper West Side.

Tina is persuaded by her socially ambitious sister Lucy to move into the apartment to stake their claim. Soon afterwards the hapless younger sister finds herself caught in the middle of an all out real estate war between members of the co-op board who want to evict Tina, and in an acrimonious legal battle with the two sons of her mother’s second husband, Bill, who dispute the sisters’ inheritance.

Wanting to play nice and sway the co-op board members to her side, Tina befriends Len a conniving and duplicitous botanist; Vince, the flirtatious son of the co-op board president; and Jennifer, the depressed teenage daughter of one of the board members, who becomes Tina’s eyes and ears during the eviction process. In the meantime, Tina also deals with Lucy’s bossy demands on how to behave.

Rebeck’s marvelously captures the conflict and tension between Tina and Lucy, a manipulative public relations executive whose sole ambition is to sell the apartment in a down market. Tina aptly describes her unhappy sister:

She smiled grimly, as if she found it satisfactory to hear me “okay,” but she didn’t look satisfied. She looked like her suit was too tight and she wasn’t eating enough red meat and her shoes hurt. She had gray smudges under her eyes, and her hair was pulled back in a bun, which was an extremely bad look for her, and usually she knew better than to try it. Her mouth was pinched together, bitter and worried, and for the first time I saw what Vince had seen instantly under the skin of my smart, ferocious sister: an old schoolmarm in a rage because the world had overlooked her.

Even when Tina offers a solution to stop a potential lawsuit over the apartment, Rebeck skillfully conveys Lucy’s disrespect for her younger sister’s suggestion:

“Hey Lucy,” I said feeling completely awful all of a sudden. “No kidding, Lucy. Maybe we could just offer to split it with them. Even split five ways, we’ll all end up with a ton of money. Has anyone offered a split?”

“I don’t believe that’s been discussed, no,” she said, with a kind of infantile brightness that had yet another sneer behind it.

“Yeah, I guess that’s pretty stupid,” I said. “Sorry. ‘Compromise.’ What a boneheaded idea.”

“You said it, not me,” she murmured under her breath.

She left. And I decided to stop asking questions nobody had any answers for anyway and just let things happen.

Subplots abound in Twelve Rooms, and include a cast of characters like the battling brothers, Pete and Doug, who want their childhood home and harbor a secret about their mother-the apartment’s original owner; the eccentric botanist neighbor, Len, who rents out Tina’s kitchen for his moss garden and has a tumultuous relationship with his daughter Charlotte; the snobbish Mrs. Gideon who aggressively campaigns for Tina’s eviction; and the harried and put upon Hispanic doorman Frank who is hopelessly in love with the sweet and beautiful Julianna Gideon; and even a ghost gets a little playtime. The problem with all these ancillary storylines is that we’re getting them all from Tina’s limited perspective and many questions that come up, go unanswered.

Twelve Rooms with a View ultimately comes to a satisfactory, but somewhat rushed conclusion. It’s almost as if Rebeck suddenly realized or was reminded that she needed to neatly tie up the subplots and give readers closure. Although many of the events that occur are highly exaggerated, there is a very big grain of truth in New York’s vicious world of real estate. Maybe renting isn’t such a bad idea after all.

The Ashes of Innocence
By Alexandra Tesluk
Tesluk Publications 2008
349 pages
$21.95

Reviewed by Randall Radic

Written by Alexandra Tesluk, The Ashes of Innocence relates the story of a child (Alexandra), whose father vanished at the end of World War II.  Alexandra’s mother – who makes Cinderella’s stepmother look like a saint – decides that, instead of going back to the Soviet Union, where she and her family would more than likely end up in a death camp, she will take her two daughters to Canada.  Upon arriving in Canada, they are classified as DP’s (displaced persons).  Today, they would be called ‘refugees.’  Essentially, they were nobodies without any status whatsoever.  No citizenship anywhere.

Things get worse.  Alexandra’s mother marries a violent alcoholic, who gets some kind of bizarre pleasure out of abusing and torturing his stepdaughters.  Good old mom, of course, who is the textbook definition of emotional inaccessibility, looks the other way.

One thing leads to another.  After the stepfather dies, Alexandra is abandoned by her mother.  Which means more suffering and loneliness.  Eventually Alexandra marries a violent alcoholic, who uses her as a punching bag.  Alexandra bears a child, whom she gives up for adoption for obvious reasons.  And on and on it goes.

Throughout the story, Alexandra keeps searching for the father she never knew.  This quest brings focus to her life.  In the end, Alexandra goes in a different direction.  She “gets a life.”  Just like in a fairy tale, she marries a prince, becomes successful in business, and reunites with her daughter.

She never does find her father.  However, she does hook up with relatives in Poland, which is where the book ends.

The story is told in a unique way and in Alexandra’s unique voice.  Which is to say Alexandra is not a professional author.  Which means the style is somewhat dicey at times.  Yet it is this very Ronco Chop-O-Matic style that gives the book its charm, the charm of a real story as told by a real person.  This realness allows Alexandra’s personality to seep out as she conveys her story.  Which means that when the reader finishes reading the book, he feels as if he knows her.  And this accretion of knowing – as the story progresses – allows the reader to identify with Alexandra, the protagonist.  Which means the reader finds himself rooting for her.

You can’t ask for much more than that.

On the old Read-O-Meter, which ranges from 1 star (pathetic) to 5 stars (outstanding), The Ashes of Innocence rates 5 stars for readability, and 4 stars for style.  Which means 4 and a half stars.

And that ain’t too shabby.

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[1] For a fact, most of the best memoirs seem to be penned by women.  Probably because men are too worried about what other people will think of them.