Steven Hammer was once a literary star. Now, his career is floundering, his marriage to a high-powered woman is crumbling, and the only bright spot in his life is Astrid, the Norwegian au pair who cares for their children—and reveres his neglected novels. But what begins as a secret infatuation soon spirals into a scandal that makes them both infamous.
Wayne is capitalizing on his previous erotic thriller, The Winner, but The Au Pair is really a companion piece to his earlier The Great Man Theory, which was similarly stuffed with male vanity, publishing gossip, and resentments of other authors ... Make no mistake: The Au Pair entertains his readers, in true Hollywood fashion. There’s a glimmer of intriguing social commentary, too ... Yet despite ample rich material, Wayne never fleshes out his narrative. His prose trails purple lines like Harold’s crayon ... All’s well that ends well in The Au Pair, which is more fairy tale than honest reflection on the challenges of a writer’s life and the relevance of imagination in the AI era.
This is a slow-burn, messy look at modern marriage. It is also a story about a man who makes horrible decisions and is then surprised when those decisions have consequences. One can’t look away. For readers who enjoy suspenseful mysteries and unlikable characters.
A brittle marriage and a too-perfect au pair upend a failed writer’s life in this clever, unsettling novel. Wayne, author of six previous novels, returns with an ingenious dissection of marriage, masculinity, and privilege, propelled by a gimlet-eyed wit ... The novel’s back half pivots into a thriller, culminating in a death and a trial that transforms private disgrace into public spectacle. If the resolution seems fanciful, it also sharpens Wayne’s point: In a culture hungry for confession, even failure can be repackaged as art ... A sly, unsettling hybrid of social satire and domestic thriller.
