Cecilie is a fed-up New York Times reporter. Her husband, Reuben, is a disgraced former NPR host and grudging stay-at-home dad. Neither can wait to flee New York and spend the summer in Copenhagen, Denmark, Cecilie’s hometown. But their vacation begins to turn inside out as soon as they land: Cecilie’s first love, Jonas, has been diagnosed with a rare, fatal illness. All of Cecilie’s friends are desperate to get him help—that is, except for Mikkel, a high-powered journalist who happens to be the only one Jonas will listen to. Mikkel’s influence quickly extends to Reuben, who’s not only intoxicated by Mikkel’s charm, but discovers in him a new model of masculinity—one he found hopelessly absent in America. As Mikkel indoctrinates Reuben with ever more depraved stunts, Reuben senses something is seriously amiss. Cecilie, too, begins to question who to trust—even herself. Drawn in by the gravity of the past, she can’t help but stray onto the road not taken.
Reuben’s plight feels urgent ... The real fun of Something Rotten, though, lies in the concentric deceptions that Reuben and Cecilie both uncover and perpetrate. At heart, this is a book about deceit, about double-crossing and discovering the difference between abstract and tangible truth.
Lipstein is such a gifted writer that he shifts nimbly between Reuben’s and Cecilie’s inner worlds ... But Lipstein’s very talents as a storyteller render some of the book’s clunkier notes that much more discordant. Reuben’s cancellation, and the downfall of his career, is a tantalizing premise for a novel. But when we finally find out what he did, it’s a bit of a letdown ... At other points, Reuben engages in morally relativistic, ends-justify-the-means thinking that falls short of profundity ... Lipstein, for all his wonderful writing, dispatches with the possible complexities of his narrative a little too breezily.
A humorous, well-paced portrait of a marriage and of lives in transition ... If there’s a shortcoming here, it’s that the women come across almost as ciphers. Although the move is back to Cecilie’s country, the emotional journey is Reuben’s.
