Lorna Mott Comes Home

March 1, 2021

A past mistress of the comedy of manners, as evidenced by her award-nominated Le Divorce and Le Marriage, Johnson returns with a genial story exploring the everyday scrapes and inconveniences of late middle age before averring that "sometimes, though rarely, things sort themselves out." Sixtyish American Lorna Mott is married to a Frenchman whose apparent philandering she has found tiring; she decides to leave him, returning home to San Francisco. She's determined to start life anew, relaunching a languishing art history career and attending to her three grown children. There's Peggy, divorced and struggling, with bright-eyed teenage daughter Julie; the successful Curt, who abandoned his family and vanished to Thailand after suffering a terrible accident; and troubled middle child Hams. Lorna's first husband, Ran, pointedly refuses to help them, and though Lorna hasn't seen him for decades, in the end she'll be wrapped up with his new family as well, even as she realizes that she's out of touch with the art world and the realities of contemporary urban American life. Maybe she's not so ready for what's next. VERDICT The crises here aren't huge, but they are real and insightfully played as Johnson delivers a satisfying understanding of life's constant vagaries.

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March 1, 2021
Art historian Lorna Mott is leaving her French husband of 18 years and their beloved home in Pont-les-Puits, France. On the way out of town, in a foretaste of the delightfully absurd plot to come, she stops to walk among dislodged corpses and bones unearthed from the town's cemetery in a storm the night before. She wonders if this is a sign that events can take unexpected turns. Of course, they do in incisive novelist Johnson's new comedy of manners. Lorna, nearly 60, returns to San Francisco, where her three hapless children live as well as her remarried ex-husband, his uber-wealthy second wife, and their ethereal 15-year-old albino daughter. Seasoning the story are Lorna's children's significant others and her grandchild, old and new acquaintances, and a ubiquitous real estate agent and her son. Johnson gently but deftly skewers everyone as they scheme for financial gain and languorously search for meaning and happiness. Can Lorna find both by restarting her life and career in an early Obama-era America she hardly recognizes and that compares unfavorably to the bucolic existence she's left behind in France?

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Starred review from February 15, 2021
A Californian facing her second divorce, this one in France, returns to the bosom of her family. In her 18th book, Johnson, now 86, returns with undimmed joie de vivre to the delicious Francophile vein she mined so successfully in her National Book Award finalist Le Divorce (1997) and other novels. Everything one looks forward to in Johnson's books is delivered in abundance here: nimble plotting, witty narration, edifying juxtaposition of French and American cultures. Returning to her hometown of San Francisco just before the financial crisis of the aughts, art historian Lorna Mott "had remembered America differently, without people lying in the street, neighbors being tied up and robbed, junk food, obesity, cars everywhere." Yet after 20 mostly happy years in the sweet village of Pont-les-Puits, she has had it with her aging playboy husband's indiscretions and now hopes to be of use to her adult children. They have problems, almost all concerning finances. Divorced Peggy can't make ends meet selling crafts on the internet; money's run out for daughter Julie's college tuition. Tech wonder-boy Curt has disappeared to the Far East after awakening from a coma, leaving a wife and young twins. Old hippie Hams and his pierced and pregnant wife are living in a terrible neighborhood. Their father, Lorna's ex, has married a young gazillionaire but seems to have little interest in helping the children of his first marriage--until he faces a problem with their 15-year-old half sister that manages to pull almost all the plot elements and cast members into a single focus. Ta da! Johnson's social and moral insight are condensed into pithy one-liners that begin each chapter: "Hope springs eternal and is sometimes rewarded." "Pace Freud, does talking about a problem always make us feel better?" She also excels at evoking people's misconstruals of others' behavior and various delicate inner states: "Her French troubles with Armand and wifedom had faded to a bearable background hum, a kind of tinnitus." Doing what she does best, Johnson shows us why she's been compared to writers like Henry James, Jane Austen, and Voltaire.

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