Meet the Hanrahan family, gathering for a momentous weekend as famous artist and notorious egoist Ray Hanrahan prepares for a new exhibition of his art—the first in many decades. His three children will be there: eldest daughter Leah, her father's biggest champion; son Patrick, who has finally decided to strike out on his own; and daughter Jess, the youngest, who has her own decision to make. And what of Lucia, Ray's steadfast and selfless wife? She is an artist, too, but has always had to put her roles as wife and mother first. What will happen if she decides to change? For Lucia is hiding secrets of her own, and as the weekend unfolds and the exhibition approaches, she must make a choice about which desires to follow.
Mendelson is a master at family drama and plots don’t get much more dramatic than this ... There is a lot going on; almost, at times, too much ... She writes from multiple perspectives, switching viewpoints more and more frequently as the weekend reaches its fiery climax until she is skipping between consciousnesses in a single paragraph. The effect is exhilarating.
Her new novel is so devoid of secondhand sentences that it’s quite possible she spent all nine years since its predecessor polishing her jokes and turning phrases round until they shine ... Throughout the book her gift is in succinct specificity of detail, which is perfectly deployed ... The book... keeps secrets, with many chapters ending on an unresolved cliffhanger or a rhetorical question. That might be one weak spot: the exquisite prose can cushion the emotions, and blot out the plot at least until the final stretch. But we don’t complain about this with other prose stylists.
Both a roiling family drama and a chilling portrait of enmeshment, coercive control and enabled addiction. Mendelson’s heady present-tense narration mingles eroticism, absurdity and pathos, capturing the intensity of illicit love, the corrosiveness of bullying, the bottomlessness of narcissism. Her similes a volley of bullseyes, her tonal chiaroscuro sharp, she darts rapidly between perspectives, ratcheting up the tension as we hurtle to the finale.
