A warm, funny and acutely perceptive debut novel about four adult siblings and the fate of the shared inheritance that has shaped their choices and their lives.
Every family has its problems. But even among the most troubled, the Plumb family stands out as spectacularly dysfunctional. Years of simmering tensions finally reach a breaking point on an unseasonably cold afternoon in New York City as Melody, Beatrice, and Jack Plumb gather to confront their charismatic and reckless older brother, Leo, freshly released from rehab. Months earlier, an inebriated Leo got behind the wheel of a car with a 19-year-old waitress as his passenger. The ensuing accident has endangered the Plumbs’ joint trust fund, “The Nest”, which they are months away from finally receiving. Meant by their deceased father to be a modest midlife supplement, the Plumb siblings have watched The Nest’s value soar along with the stock market and have been counting on the money to solve a number of self-inflicted problems.
Melody, a wife and mother in an upscale suburb, has an unwieldy mortgage and looming college tuition for her twin teenage daughters. Jack, an antiques dealer, has secretly borrowed against the beach cottage he shares with his husband, Walker, to keep his store open. And Bea, a once-promising short-story writer, just can’t seem to finish her overdue novel. Can Leo rescue his siblings and, by extension, the people they love? Or will everyone need to reimagine the futures they’ve envisioned? Brought together as never before, Leo, Melody, Jack, and Beatrice must grapple with old resentments, present-day truths, and the significant emotional and financial toll of the accident as well as finally acknowledge the choices they have made in their own lives.
This is a story about the power of family, the possibilities of friendship, the ways we depend upon one another and the ways we let one another down. In this tender, entertaining, and deftly written debut, Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney brings a remarkable cast of characters to life to illuminate what money does to relationships, what happens to our ambitions over the course of time, and the fraught yet unbreakable ties we share with those we love.
Mediocre family drama This fairly pedestrian novel recounts the exploits of the four siblings of the Plumb family and is a routine account of how an extended family “heals” itself over the course of a year. I was amazed to read that the publisher paid seven figures for this debut work. What they got is a totally standard and unremarkable book that is easy to read but says almost nothing. I can see it becoming one of those nauseating movies that studios release just ahead of Christmas – a mediocre and…
“…All the Quiet Lives of Aspiration …” Four siblings focus their lives, their futures and their dreams on a trust – “The Nest” – to be distributed on the youngest one’s fortieth birthday. Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney gives readers the Plumb family, a group of dysfunctional individuals, united in their love for one another and eventually in their learning to let go of the past.
A lot of regret – mine, for selecting this The minute I read the first sentence of this book from the Prologue, I regretted selecting it.