THE HEWLETT-WOODMERE READERS:

A Monthly Afternoon Discussion Group

2010 – 2011

OUR ELEVENTH SEASON OF GOOD READING!

Mondays at 1 PM

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Monday, Mar. = 7 at 1 PM: THE THREE WEISSMANNS OF <= st1:place w:st=3D"on">WESTPORT by Cathle= en Schine

Discussion Leader: Ellen Getreu

Betty Weissmann has just been dumped by her husband of forty-eight years. Exiled fro= m her elegant New York apartment by her husband’s mistress, she and her two middle-aged daughters, Miranda and Annie, regroup in a run-down W= estport, Connecticut, beach cottage.= In Schine’s playful and devo= ted homage to Jane Austen’s Sense= and Sensibility, the impulsive sister is Miranda, a literary agent entangle= d in a series of scandals, and the more pragmatic sister is Annie, a library director, who feels compelled to move in and watch over her capricious moth= er and sister. Schine’s wi= tty, wonderful novel “is simply full of pleasure: the pleasure of reading, the pleasure of Austen, and the pleasure that the characters so rightly and humorously pursue….An absolute triumph̶= 1; (The Cleveland Plain Dealer).

Monday, May. = 9 at 1 PM: GREAT HOUSE by Nicole Kra= uss

Discussion Leader: Candace Plotsker-Herman

Connected solely by a desk of enormous dimension and m= any drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or give it away, three people--a lonely American novelist clinging to the memory of a poet who has mysteriously vanished in Chile, an old man in Israel facing the imminent de= ath of his wife of 51 years, and an esteemed antiques dealer tracking down the things stolen from his father by the Nazis--struggle to create a meaningful permanence in the face of inevitable loss. -Novelist

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A Different Kind of Love Triangle

By DOMINIQUE BROWNING

THE THREE WEISSMANNS OF WESTPORT

By Cathleen Schine

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, th= ere were two sisters who lived in = Manhattan. One was wildly emotional, the other smartly sensible. The sisters found lov= e, as lovely women do, and they lost love, but no matter where love went they always worked hard and had rich lives. Now these sisters also had a sweet, beloved mother, whose own fairy tale of a life suddenly came apart when one= day her sweet, beloved husband came home and announced that he was divorcing he= r. She was 75 years old. She was banished from her handsomely appointed Centra= l Park West apartment. Her daughters rushed to her rescue. But their lives were falling apart, too. One was broke and disgraced, the other lonely and worri= ed.

Both were in danger of misplacing their hearts yet again. So they all mo= ved to an enchanted cottage. . . . And off races the sparkling, crisp, clever, deft, hilarious and deeply affecting new novel by Cathleen Schine, her best yet, “The Three Weissmanns of Westport.”

Shall we quickly usher Jane Austen through? Dear re= aders will recognize the essential outlines of “Sense and Sensibility.̶= 1; Poor Jane — or is she lucky, to have been the object of such ransacki= ng posthumous reverence? In recent years, “Emma,” “Pride and Prejudice” and “Persuasion” have been hauled in to prop up the likes of the Bridget Jones novels, the movie “Clueless” and countless other projects. Austen is now considered the godmother of chick l= it, whatever that is — let’s just say, to heighten the inherent absurdity, any novel written by women about women for women, as even the id= ea of a chick being young is no longer operative. (After all, cougars are chic= ks too.) Nor is it necessarily a man who is the heroine’s salvation.

Schine sets her novel squarely in the most appealing part of chick-lit territory — its light-hearted readability — and then thumbs her nose as she starts kicking up the dust. The strange thing about the Jane brigade is that most of its practitioners have raided only her plots, apparently not quite up to the task of honoring the essence of Austen. But Schine’s homage has it all: stinging social satire, mordant wit, deli= cate charm, lilting language and cosseting materialistic detail.

“The Three Weissmanns of Westport” is richly inhabited. Schine’s characters, minor and major, have such a precisely imagined presence that they need only nod with affectionate courtesy to the shadows = cast by “Sense and Sensibility” before chasing them away. One of the sisters, even-tempered Annie, a librarian, lives in “the soft dappled world” of 19th-century English novels; she takes a mouthy, pacifying pleasure in simple words, like “jalopy.” The other sister, fier= ce, self-absorbed, beautiful, loyal, tender Miranda, who “found talent and excitement everywhere,” is a literary agent until she is disgraced by scandal, which Schine describes in a hilarious send-up of our own recent cr= op of lying writers and the television personalities who hype them too much.

Schine is clearly a writer who loves to read as much as she loves to wri= te. And it is great fun to play English major with her. I indulged in a gratify= ing Austen binge (it had been a while), just for the pleasure of tracing the pl= ot lines that are borrowed here, along with lots of other fine and wicked riff= s. “The Three Weissmanns of Westport” is a dense fruitcake of appo= site references: I spotted Louisa May Alcott (Ann= ie “is too fond of books. It has turned her brain”); Emily Dickinson (who “made even fear feel rich and full and active”); and Dickens’s Mr. Micawber (whose hopeful expectation makes him AnnieR= 17;s role model). With a resounding thwack, Schine also delivers a swift kick to certain middle-aged male writers when Annie falls for someone in spite of h= is work — which embodies “the qualities she disliked in both the Jewish writers of his generation (that showing off masked as neurosis) and = the WASPs (the coldness masked as modesty).”

In this rarefied, upper-middle-class, genteel world, books and money mat= ter. So does being Jewish, in a reformed, mildly self-mocking sort of way. The Weissmann parents, for whom Nazis are a living memory, are ever mindful of their social roles. “The goyim . . . do not feed their guests; it is = not their custom,” the girls’ mother explains, bringing a cake as a gift while paying a social call. “We must respect the customs of other cultures, but that does not mean we have to starve.” While they’= ;re decorating their Christmas tree, her husband reminds the girls that “= this holiday celebrates the birth of a man in whose name an entire religion has persecuted and murdered our people for thousands of years. . . . And knowing that, why should we let them have all the fun?”

The plot takes appropriately unexpected twists and turns as the sisters carom through their love affairs. I, for one, can’t wait for the inevitable movie. But “The Three Weissmanns of Westport” is much more than a romantic comedy. Or, rather, the romance is located in motherho= od and in memories of childhood, as much as in a lover’s bed. Whether she’s describing tender moments with a 2-year-old or with young adult sons, Schine is perceptive, even breathtaking, in her observations. There’s also real pain in these pages. The characters lie awake in the middle of the night, agonizing, careers smashed, bank accounts emptied. “Old age was now, too, caught up in the stink of financial worry. She= was a successful woman in her early 50s and cutting corners the way she had as a graduate student.” That will feel sadly familiar to thousands of us.<= /p>

Under the snap and sizzle of the story there lurks a profound tragedy — in the heartbreak of the jettisoned wife, chucked out “to spin helplessly in the dark, infinite sky of elderly divorce.” Annie’= ;s writer boyfriend gives readings in front of “a hundred such women, a thousand. . . . Older women, still beautiful in their older way, still vibr= ant in their older way, with their beauty and vibrancy suddenly accosted by the= one thing beauty and vibrancy cannot withstand — irrelevance.”

Chicks need a happy ending, at least every once in a while. What choice = is there but to believe that something good will happen? Schine gives her characters more than their fair share of luck, but she is also brave enough= to let them wrestle with raw fear. Among its many gifts to the dearest sort of reader, a fully engaged one, “The Three Weissmanns of Westport” offers the chance for a meditation on that snake of Emily Dickinson’s= as it slithers through the grass — the snake that sometimes startles and frightens us, so undefended and unprepared are we, caught in our “tig= hter breathing, and zero at the bone.”

Dominique Browning writes an online column for the Environmental Defense= Fund. Her new memoir, “Slow Love,” will be published in May.

THE WALL STREET= JOURNAL

Austen City Limits: Now in Connecticut

By Joanne Kaufman

Although the image is contrary to Jane Aus= ten's unassuming nature, I like to contemplate the "Pride and Prejudice"= ; author in paradise, ruining eternity for the dour Brontë sisters and George E= liot by issuing smug daily updates about the mini-industry of Austen knock-offs = that her work has inspired. "Bridget Jones's Diary," "The Jane Au= sten Book Club," "Jane Austen in Scarsdale," "Austenland," "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," "Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict" and "Suspense and Sensibility" are but a few of the panegyrics, prequels, sequels and spin-offs produced thus far. The past year alone saw the release of more th= an three-dozen Jane-oriented titles, among them "Prada and Prejudice.&quo= t; (And that's not counting academic treatises.) "Pride and Extreme Prejudice," anyone?

The Austen homage-wave apparently will con= tinue in 2010: Witness the arrival of Cathleen Schine's "The Three Weissmann= s of Westport," a fitfully appealing, rather too literal retelling of "Sense and Sensibility" set mostly on the = Connecticut shores of Long Island Sound and in the posh redoubts of Manhattan's Upper West Side.

"Sense and Sensibility" begins with a death and ends with a marriage. As befits a contemporary take on Austen, "The Three Weissman= ns of Westport" opens with a divorce and ends with an off-center romance. Successful businessman Joseph (Josie) Weissmann is 78 when he decides to ca= ll it quits with the endlessly optimistic Betty, his wife of almost 50 years. = He cites irreconcilable differences as the cause of the divorce, but it turns = out that these irreconcilable differences have a name: Felicity, though one will forgive Betty for referring to this viperish pretty young thing as Duplicit= y.

When Betty, like the sweet, rather foolish Mrs. Henry Dashwood in "Sense and Sensibility," must vacate her "big and luscious&q= uot; home for a small, poorly appointed cottage in the countryside, her daughter= s—reticent, practical Annie, an administrator at a venerable private library (read: Eli= nor) and headstrong, emotional literary-agent Miranda (read: Marianne)— co= me along. Betty and Miranda "seemed to consider this miserable move to be= a grand and tragic adventure," writes Ms. Schine, the author of beguiling novels like "The New Yorkers" and "The Love Letter." To= a degree, Annie envies their relatively sunny outlook, but she is also annoyed because she knows that she will be expected to take care of the mundane administrative details in their new life, duties that will "fall, inevitably like dead leaves in autumn, to her."

As Janeites navigate "The Three Weissma= nns of Westport," they will amuse themselves by pointing out the plot turns a= nd dialogue cunningly reworked from "Sense and Sensibility." Dashwood cousin Sir John Middleton—the jolly, gregarious Austen character whose generosity helps the mother and two daughters when they lose their home—is jolly, gregarious Weissmann Cousin Lou. Devious, ego-massaging Lucy Steele—a secret rival for the affection of Elinor Dashwood's love interest in "Sense and Sensibility"—has morphed into Amber,= a conniving house sitter and massage therapist who also proves a dab hand at massaging egos. Both novels feature faithless, opportunistic objects of des= ire. True love, whether in the 19th or 21st century, is a tough proposition.

No Cathleen Schine book is without wit and sharply observed moments. Thus, there is Annie's take on a novelist whose w= ork embodied "the qualities she disliked in both the Jewish writers of his generation (that showing-off masked as neurosis) and the WASPs (the coldness masked as modesty)." But because "Sense and Sensibility" see= ms more a final stop for Ms. Schine than a jumping-off point, "The Three = Weissmanns of Westport" is never sufficiently compelling on its own terms and nev= er succeeds at being more than a mildly diverting curiosity.

—Ms. Kaufman writes about culture and the = arts for the Journal.

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Austen in Connecticut

‘Weissmanns of Westport’ resets ‘Sense and Sensibility’ on Long Island Sound

By Adam Kirsch |

Reading The Three Weissmanns of Westport, the new novel by Cathle= en Schine, is a curious experience. Even as you turn the pages, following the genteel misadventures of the titular clan—the aging mother, Betty Weissmann, and her two middle-aged, lovelorn daughters, Annie and Miranda—the book seems literally insubstantial, as though it is about= to melt or turn to smoke in your hands. This is less on account of the writing, which is undemanding but intelligent, than of the reader’s realization that the book is only a temporary incarnation of itself. Before Schine wrote it, her novel’s story belonged to Jane Austen—anyone who rememb= ers Sense and Sensibility will recognize that Miranda and Annie are 21st-century,= New York Jewish versions of Marianne and Elinor Dashwood, Austen’s hot- a= nd cold-running heroines. And Schine’s high-concept translation of Auste= n is surely destined for Hollywood<= /st1:place>, which has already shown a predilection for the work of both Schine (The = Love Letter) and her original (examples too numerous to mention).

The property can stand so much recycling because the story Austen devised touches on perennially interesting subjects—love and money, and their constant byproducts, hypocrisy and self-delusion. Sense and Sensibility<= /i> begins with the ruin of the Dashwood sisters, who lose everything when their father dies and his property passes to his son by a previous marriage. Alon= g with the Dashwoods’ home and income go their social position, and along wi= th their social position goes the likelihood of finding suitable husbands on t= he Regency marriage market. Elinor, the sensible sister, discovers that the man she counted on, Edward Ferrars, is secretly engaged to someone else; Marian= ne, the passionate one, falls in love with the handsome <= st1:place w:st=3D"on">Willoughby, who leads her on and then c= ruelly jilts her. As usually happens in Austen, however, these trials ennoble and educate the heroines so that they are prepared, by the end, for a more matu= re happiness. Edward Ferrars gets out of his ill-advised engagement when the g= irl decides to marry his richer brother, and so he is free to marry Elinor at l= ast. Meanwhile, Marianne, who has seen the price of passion, is united with the sober Colonel Brandon.

In taking over this plot, Schine gains the advantages of its universality and simplicity, but also sets herself the technical problem of translating = it into our very different social, economic, and psychological world. We no lo= nger have laws of entail, like the one that disinherited the Dashwoods; so Schine substitutes a divorce, which banishes Betty Weissmann from her Central Park West apartment to a relative’s shabby cottage in Westport. Daughters are no longer under= their parents’ power, materially or emotionally, the way Marianne and Elinor were; so Schine contrives professional and personal crises for Annie and Miranda, which send them back under their mother’s roof.

Miranda, in a ripped-from-the-headlines touch, is a book agent, who is disgraced when it turns out her memoirists have been making up their trauma= s, James Frey-style. Like Marianne, she is romantic and temperamental, qualiti= es that Schine does not so much demonstrate as announce: “For the member= s of Miranda’s family, her unpredictability had become predictable. There = were tantrums when she was young; when she was older, a combative dedication to whatever it was to which she was dedicated at the moment, and, at every age, the demands and the drama.” Similarly, to leave the reader in no doubt that Annie is the sensible one, Schine makes her a librarian. Signposts like these make it easy to navigate the book on cruise control. (In case there w= as any doubt that The Three Weissmanns is meant to be upscale beach reading, the cover shows a plush embroidered chair on a beach.)

The Dashwoods’ love troubles, too, are translated into Weissmannian equivalents. The elusive Edward Ferrars becomes Frederick Barrow, a middle-= aged novelist who seduces Annie and then retreats into writerly narcissism. The flighty Willoughby= becomes Kit Maybank, an actor whom Miranda loves primarily because his young son brings out her thwarted maternal instincts.
There is even a Colonel Brandon figure, the shadowy Roberts, a semiretired lawyer who helps Betty Weissmann with her divorce. The romantic equations do not balance quite as neatly in Schine as they do in Austen, but there is so little at stake with these thinly drawn characters that it hardly matters.<= /p>
None of these rough-and-ready equivalents, it must be said, will bear mu= ch readerly skepticism. Betty Weissmann is bizarrely passive when her husband = of 50 years, Joseph, kicks her out on the street; for all the complaints we he= ar about her and Miranda’s newfound poverty, their lifestyle never seems= to change; even Annie, who is in her fifties and the widowed mother of two boy= s, never acts with the toughness or resourcefulness her life experience should have taught her. In short, the kind of deprivation that meant disaster in A= usten’s novel becomes, in Schine’s, a rather jolly holiday, the kind of vacat= ion from middle-class life that only the securely middle-class reader can dream about. Miranda Weissmann even plays out the ultimate anti-feminist fantasy, leaving the big city and her challenging career for a life of gardening and babysitting in Connecticut.

But the most unusual of Schine’s choices has to do with her characters’ Jewishness, which the title so clearly insists on. The Weissmanns are portrayed as highly assimilated—they remember that it’s Hanukkah only while celebrating Christmas Eve and mark Rosh Hash= anah with a dinner party, not by going to synagogue. Yet when Miranda imagines G= od, He speaks with a “Yiddish lilt,” and when she eats shellfish at= a party she imagines being punished with food poisoning. This residual Jewish= ness is a source of comedy, but it also seems to carry a deeper sociological meaning. For Austen’s plot to make any kind of sense today, Schine ne= eded to find a rough contemporary equivalent for Austen’s gentry, the class background against which all of her characters conduct their marital maneuv= ers. There is really nothing like that gentry in 21st century America= : a self-contained, rigidly hierarchical caste, which prefers inheriting money = to making it, and lives by a set of codified manners that are almost more important than morals.

Certainly this does not describe the life lived by American Jews—y= et it is precisely in the Weissmann’s Jewish milieu that Schine finds her equivalent to Austen’s gentry. In fact, the comic premise of The T= hree Weissmanns of Westport—Jane Austen, but with Jews!—is less striking than the tacit assumption that readers, including non-Jewish reade= rs, will accept the New York Jewish upper-bourgeoisie as an equivalent of Auste= n’s milieu. No very great likeness is needed: it is enough that the Jewish world can be plausibly imagined as affluent, family-centered, and—above all—self-contained, so that the characters can keep running into one another as the plot demands. Schine’s story did not used to be Jewish, and if history is any guide, it will not stay Jewish once it becomes a movi= e; but in its current incarnation, its Jewishness may be the most intriguing t= hing about it.

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