The novel is an engaging confection. It is not, always, the highest version of its form—at times the effervescence of the plot is flattened by emphatic plot-point repetitions, and there are a few loose ends—but it is, at its best, a satisfying example of a time-honored genre ... Johnson is surely also observing that a certain entertaining type of comedy of manners—in which the elegant and amusingly entitled fuss about diminished incomes and inherited legacies or the lack thereof—is also perhaps nearing its end, at least for now, at least here. The frothiness is intrinsic to the novel’s pleasure—while Lorna obviously cares a good deal about how things might turn out, the stakes are, in global terms, fairly low—but this is also what will make it a treat for some, and not at all pleasurable for others ... it is a tender but decided indictment of the United States in the twenty-first century.
... thoroughly charming ... A delightful comedy of manners involving the entire extended family ensues, spiced up by an unlikely pregnancy. Even when the proceedings become a touch tawdry, there’s a blessed absence of American puritanism in their presentation. Ms. Johnson, now 87 years old, is the least scandalized of authors and she deals with sex and other secrets with an amused c’est comme ça attitude learned from her adopted country of France.
The opening scene is perfection. We meet the eponymous heroine of Diane Johnson’s latest novel, Lorna Mott Comes Home, as she rides in the back of a taxi, en route to the train station in Lyon. Lorna, an American woman 'of a certain age,' asks the driver to stop so she can observe the aftermath of a mudslide that has unearthed coffins, bursting them open and exposing corpses, bones and 'a huge, sticky hillock of treacherous clay' in the village of Pont-les-Puits, where she has lived with her French husband for 20 years ... a review of the latest entry to this 87-year-old author’s body of work arguably ought to have less to do with deconstructing the plot or gauging the likability of the characters than with heralding the arrival of another of her smart comedies of manners. Fans of Diane Johnson will not be disappointed. Those new to her work might best approach these pages through the lens of a social anthropologist who studies the lives of characters prone to problem solving by crisscrossing the Atlantic.
Johnson uses...wealth to fuel all manner of conflicts, both tacit and public, among the Mott family. The results are often quite funny and frequently unfair ... Lorna's sons are less clearly drawn, particularly Curt, who abandons his family and moves to Thailand when he wakes from a coma. Johnson does a superb job of establishing the small, privileged universe of Ran's second family—his wife, Amy, their daughter Gilda—and the way money inoculates them from some harm without making them invincible. Many chapters open with a kind of platitude or declaration...after which the tone re-establishes its spectacular wit and humor. The novel's interest in gossip and unpredictability invites an astonishing series of coincidences and connections ... Johnson has great ease with wry asides ... There are endless strings of smart observations, tucked next to moments of real vulnerability and fear.
... none of these criticisms of American culture are new, but they still land sharply ... Johnson writes with assured brio and wit – although with some repetitiveness. She spins a plot busy with crises...Through it all, Johnson fondly ribs her characters – for their avarice more than anything, as they all angle for a cut of Randall’s rich wife’s pie. There are ridiculous complications, and complications to the complications ... Despite its incisive barbs, Lorna Mott Comes Home is an affectionate romp of a book. Who can resist a character who gallantly proffers her Hermès silk scarf to swaddle a newborn? Johnson’s fans should lap this one up, along with the duck à l’orange served in the French hospital cafeteria.
So, it seems churlish to talk about mourning the loss of pleasure. But what about the relief and flooding happiness that accompanies its re-introduction? That is the state I found myself in while reading Lorna Mott Comes Home, the divine Diane Johnson’s latest propulsive novel—her 12th—a layered yet airy confection. I felt like someone awakened from a coma to the taste of chocolate or the look on my own children’s faces when they first encountered ice cream, a wonderment that something this delicious might pass this way again ... Johnson is a master plotter and soon...loose and lonely threads knot up into an unlikely but entertaining story that is hard to put down ... Johnson specializes in piercing, satirical wit, and though this novel’s various husbands, children, and grandchildren are at times clearly suffering, as is our heroine, I often found myself chuckling mordantly ... you might as well read about someone else’s messy fun in a book just like this one.
Though there are many points of view in the novel (which frequently lends a repetitive quality to the storytelling), Lorna’s is the most captivating. She is cheeky and has a buoyant sense of humor that grounds the dizzying pace of events ... The jacket copy for Lorna Mott Comes Home says the novel captures the way we live now. But, as we all know far too well, the way we live now is uncharted compared with 2008 — and with 1975. The historic periods of both novels appear far in the rearview mirror in the wake of a global pandemic, the financial ruin of so many, the immediate urgency of racial reckoning. But there is comfort to be found in the familiar dissection of family — in how we navigate the unhappiness that family, and life, throw our way, and by this measure these two novels offer solace and hope.
... an inspired inversion of the premise: it's a reentry saga revolving around an American abroad who has decided that it's finally time to return Stateside ... a sober look at a peculiarly American restlessness only exacerbated by a tanking economy. It's also a dishy drama the likes of which Johnson's readers have come to expect, with crystalline sentences and a roving point of view that can't help but give the delicious impression that characters are talking about one another behind their backs. Readers may not like the choices that Johnson's characters make--and that includes Lorna--but this is precisely what gives the book its brutal verisimilitude.
... the parts never cohere into an elegant whole. Instead, Lorna Mott Comes Home feels cluttered with events, like a TV series with so many subplots that we scarcely have time to take stock of one arc before we are catapulted into the next. Of course, a disjointed novel could suit our agonized and atomized moment, when it is so difficult for individuals to discern their place in a broader community. Indeed, much of Lorna’s disaffection stems from her suspicion that she no longer fits into American society, which in any case appears to be unraveling. But Lorna Mott Comes Home is less a self-consciously fragmented commentary on America’s fragmentation than a confused compendium of scattered characters and dramas. Johnson has often managed to enlarge even the smallest lives, but in her latest, the lives at stake are so hastily sketched that they remain diminutive and difficult to believe in ... the erotic energies directed at married Frenchmen in the rest of Johnson’s corpus are redirected toward the pursuit of desirable real estate.
... genial ... The crises here aren’t huge, but they are real and insightfully played as Johnson delivers a satisfying understanding of life’s constant vagaries.
... [a] delightfully absurd plot ... Johnson gently but deftly skewers everyone as they scheme for financial gain and languorously search for meaning and happiness. Can Lorna find both by restarting her life and career in an early Obama-era America she hardly recognizes and that compares unfavorably to the bucolic existence she’s left behind in France?
In her 18th book, Johnson, now 86, returns with undimmed joie de vivre to the delicious Francophile vein ... Everything one looks forward to in Johnson's books is delivered in abundance here: nimble plotting, witty narration, edifying juxtaposition of French and American cultures ... Johnson's social and moral insight are condensed into pithy one-liners that begin each chapter ... Doing what she does best, Johnson shows us why she's been compared to writers like Henry James, Jane Austen, and Voltaire.
A welcome return to her wheelhouse in this propulsive domestic dramedy of manners ... Johnson’s usual razor-sharp prose and astute observations are on full display as she tweaks comic incidents arising out of her characters’ relationships. This provocative family chronicle resolves in a poignant ending with prospects for a promising sequel. The author’s fans are in for a treat.
