BOOK REVIEW
by peggy millin

Better Homes and Husbands
by Valerie Ann Leff
St. Martin’s Press, June 2004


In Better Homes and Husbands, her debut novel, Asheville resident Valerie Ann Leff gives us a front-row ticket to the drama that is daily life for New York City’s rich and famous.

Her book chronicles the events – and scandals – that take place in the lives of the residents and one doorman at 980 Park Avenue, a fictional Manhattan apartment building, during the last thirty years of the twentieth century. Yet Leff’s story neither satirizes nor mindlessly glamorizes the wealthy New York lifestyle. A deft storyteller, Leff explores each character with compassion, insight, and a large dose of humor. Better Homes and Husbands accomplishes what any successful work of literary fiction sets out to do: enables readers to see into lives very different from their own and to recognize the similarities in the human experience.

It is not surprising that Leff chose to set her first novel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She, herself, grew up at 1040 Fifth Avenue – the building that housed Jackie Onassis and her children, a branch of the French Rothschilds, and many other members of New York’s elite. Better Homes and Husbands is the story of the class struggles and caste feuds that go on within the walls of 980 Park Avenue, casting a spotlight on the diversity that exists even within America’s notorious top one percent. It is a story about one small community – its conflicts and alliances – as well as an exploration of how the comforts and discomforts of belonging to such a rarified stratum of society affect the individual characters in the book.

The novel is written in the voices of several distinct characters and narrators, each one offering a different take on the world of 980 Park Avenue. At first, one seems to be reading a series of unrelated stories. Soon, though, a shape emerges; a character who is glimpsed and judged by another in one chapter has the chance to show her experience of life in the next section, and, by the end, it is only the reader, not any character inside the book, who is privy to the whole story of the building. On the second page of the book, Leff writes, “A suicide, a strike, a seventeen-year-old girl pregnant. A scandalous arrest in the late 1980s. A lawsuit barely averted by the co-op board. No one knows the whole history, and the truth is understood in pieces by one resident or another, by a daughter, a friend of the family, by a doorman. The truth is told in stories, in voices tinged with opinion, envy, regret. The truth is kept in the building, never completely revealed.”

Issues of ethnicity – Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, Latin American, African-American – permeate the book. Dick Sapphire, the successful Jewish lawyer, carries a grudge against his WASP socialite neighbors, yet he later admits to himself that marrying two gentile women was “a kind of racy privilege he’d exercised.” Sandra Payne, a prep school senior becomes pregnant by her father’s Jamaican chauffeur and wonders where her child will fit in, and, satisfyingly, the reader does find out in a later chapter about her biracial son. Angela Somoza, granddaughter of the infamous Nicaraguan dictator, has every high society door open to her, yet her guilt inherited from her ancestral legacy leads her to participate dangerously in clandestine left-wing Central American politics. One of the strengths of Better Homes and Husbands is how characters who are recognizable types do not behave in stereotypical ways. The novel is full of surprises all the way through to its optimistic ending.

Leff writes with a light touch, careful to allow her characters to reveal themselves without authorial interference. Yet there is plenty of political and social subtext in the novel, and if there are any heroes, they are mostly heroines. Women like Sandra Payne, Angela Somoza, Sydney Sapphire, the Baroness d’Alencon and even the stuffy arch-socialite Beverly Coddington make brave and interesting choices in Better Homes and Husbands, rocking the social order just enough that, even in a bastion of privilege like 980 Park Avenue, a reader can sense the walls trembling.

Peggy Millin is a writer, writing teacher and coach through her business ClarityWorks, Inc., in Asheville. She is author of fiction and nonfiction and teaches occasionally through the Great Smokies Writing Program of UNCA.
[ pmillin@clarityworksonline.com ]

Valerie Ann Leff is co-founder and co-director of the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNC—Asheville. Her stories and essays have been published in magazines like The Antioch Review, Carolina Quarterly, Chelsea, Lilith, The South Carolina Review, The Sun, and many others. She has lived in Asheville since 1996.

“I’m sort of the corollary to Thomas Wolfe,” Leff says, laughing. “He moved to New York and wrote about Asheville. I moved to Asheville and wrote about New York. Fortunately, my book is shorter.”

Leff will give three readings in the Asheville area in July:

Friday, July 2 at 7pm at Malaprop’s bookstore, downtown Asheville
Saturday, July 17 at 3pm Blue Moon Books, 271 Oak Avenue, Spruce Pine
Sunday, July 18 at 2pm Barnes & Noble83 South Tunnel Road, Asheville
Each of these events is free and open to the public.