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Summary
Summary
Handsome and ambitious, Mirella and Howard Cook-Goldman have it all-two precious children, dual careers, a great old colonial house on Massachusetts's North Shore, a golden retriever. The only thing they lack is reliable child care.
Enter Randi Gill, sent by Family Options, Ltd., an agency specializing in Midwestern girls with teaching aspirations ("Could you be Comfortable with Anything but the Best for Your Family?. . . Guaranteed Nationwide FBI Criminal Fingerprinting and Background Checks."). Randi's references are perfect. She's perfect. She cleans, cooks, sews, and makes her own Play-Doh. The children love her . . . almost too much.
Though it's hard for Mirella to watch Randi succeed with the children where she has failed, she can't deny the peace and order Randi has brought to the household. But perfection is a tough act to maintain, and soon enough, there are ruptures. When events force Mirella and Howard to reveal the secrets they've been hiding from each other, the family cataclysm catapults the nanny (who has secrets of her own) into a position of unnatural control.
In A Perfect Arrangement , Suzanne Berne now fixes her sights on contemporary, two-career family life. Overscheduled and overwhelmed, today's parents are desperate for help. Whatever child care they manage to set up, the arrangements are rarely perfect. This suspenseful novel asks a question all of them face: "Is there anyone you can trust with your children?"
Author Notes
Suzanne Berne is the author of three novels, the first of which, A Crime in the Neighborhood , won great Britain's Orange Prize. Her most recent novel is The Ghost at the Table . She lives with her family near Boston and teaches at Boston College.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Quotidian details of an apparently perfect domestic life spell suspense in Berne's second novel (after A Crime in the Neighborhood), set in the small New England town of New Aylesbury. Mirella Cook-Goldman works for a Boston law firm; her husband, Howard, is an architect who works at home. Their two young children, five-year-old Pearl and toddler Jacob, mill about their lovely colonial house. But this pleasant surface shows cracks: Pearl is temperamental and Jacob developmentally slow; Mirella and Howard talk past one another he resents her long work hours, and she feels distanced from her family. Both are harboring major secrets. Their new nanny, Randi, is young and energetic she cooks, cleans and devises games for the children. In theory, Mirella and Howard should have more time to spend with each other, but it soon becomes evident that their problems run deeper than lack of intimacy. Things further disintegrate when Mirella and Howard realize that hyperefficient Randi might be too possessive and not quite what she seems. Berne is an assured writer and is at her best with careful, observant descriptions of family life. The novel is less successful at providing an emotional center the characters often seem like studiously drawn archetypes and the jacked-up dramatic scenes toward the end are forced. But a sense of the fragility and also resilience of our everyday existence lingers after the final page. Agent, Colleen Mohyde. (May 25) Forecast: Berne's first novel won the Orange Prize in the U.K., was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times and the Edgar Allan Poe first fiction awards all of which will promote name recognition. Selling to fans of Sue Miller and Alice Hoffman should help build sales. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
A Perfect Arrangement by Suzanne Berne 320pp, Viking, pounds 12.99 If literary comparisons are to be made, then Suzanne Berne's second novel lies somewhere between A M Homes's Music for Torching and the minutely observed, ultimately restorative social comedies of Anne Tyler. In Homes's book, a relentlessly grim portrait of a failing marriage, the two protagonists unite briefly by deliberately burning their house down, an act of self-vandalism that sets them on a path of liberating sexual experimentation, then drives them further into corrosive mutual disgust. The novel ends with an act of external violence visited on one of their children, as if to underline the rather obvious point that when adults go mad, it's the children who pick up the pieces. Although Berne has adopted this model for her own contribution to the literature of domestic crisis, her instincts for preservation prevent her from, as it were, burning the house down. This is where the Anne Tyler moments come in. In A Perfect Arrangement , the threat to the perfect suburban family is always external, although it is ushered in by weakness and misjudgment. When instability and unrestrained desires occur within the family circle, they can be tamped down, smoothed over and ignored; when they come from outside, their effects are unpredictable and ungovernable. Berne's novel takes as its subject the paranoia of middle-class Americans about who looks after their children. Only a few pages in, Mirella Cook, leaving her husband to interview a new recruit while she begins her commute to a Boston law firm, is troubled by the image of the nanny who "sat in the news day after day, face blank as a dinner roll, beside all those pictures of the poor little boy". Meanwhile, moving slowly towards the household like judgment day is Randi, on the run from her white-trash mother, festooned with faked references and brimming with ideas for creative play and recipes for fried cheese-balls. For Mirella Cook and Howard Goldman, harassed lawyer and dreamy architect, the prospect of happily occupied children and sparkling kitchen surfaces is too much to resist. The novel's conceit is that Randi is the very opposite of a neglectful, cruel abuser. There are no shaken babies or unchanged nappies, no smuggled-in boyfriends or covert cigarette-smoking, no boiling pans within toddlers' grasps. There is, instead, order and harmony, in the shape of pancakes, clean laundry and ingeniously crafted sock dolls. So what's the problem? The problem is, in fact, rather difficult to detect. It might lie with Randi herself, whose desperate project to insert herself into an idealised family leads to "attachment complications" for the children and a feeling of uneasy superfluity for her employers. It might originate with Mirella, drawn to the "heady, tyrannical power" of child-rearing, yet both emotionally and economically locked in to the complicated simplicities of law enforcement, where she cheerfully mediates on behalf of wronged fathers and mixed-up lesbian couples. Or it might be the result of Howard's understated flakiness, his concentration on restoring their determinedly symbolic house, a collapsing colonial pile in an unbearably neat and tidy New England community. Each of this trinity of characters is beset by their own yearning, and each is pursing fulfilment by way of deception. While Randi nervously leaps for the phone in order to head her mother off at the pass, Mirella frets over her secret pregnancy and Howard wonders whether that unwise affair with a neurotic former colleague is about to catch up with him. And it is, of course; in the same way that Mirella's stomach will swell and Randi's mother will finally show up on the doorstep. Berne has created an impressively involved scenario to threaten her nuclear family, if not entirely destroy it. Along the road to climactic crisis, we are given some nicely turned insights and some alert, intelligent writing. Berne finds humour in the cultural collisions: who wouldn't be on Randi's side when she wonders, "with real interest", how the po-faced Howard can "not believe in" TV? In fact, much of the novel's enjoyment comes from watching Howard get his comeuppance, particularly when the vengeful and altogether sympathetic Nadine - who has, after all, been described as a brief dalliance who "faded away like a label on a jar" - makes public his misdemeanours to the lynch mob at a local planning meeting. But there is also something of an imbalance between Berne's finely shaded observations and the size of the task she has set herself. We get very little, for example, on the Cook-Goldman's little boy, who has yet to speak despite nearing three years old, and who must labour under the pathological diagnosis of "impaired reciprocal interaction" and "elective mutism". Meanwhile, Berne finds time to describe "the crepitating sound of disturbed Cellophane", a farmhouse's "weary air of besieged persistence" and a thousand other tiny domestic and local details. She is a virtuoso of small things, but less forthcoming on the larger scale. What we get is a rather algebraic version of events, with everyone wanting more than they can have or are prepared to pay for. Mirella can't look after the children she already has, but would like more. Howard would like to build lovely houses of quasi-philosophical perfection, but can't find anyone to finance his authentic mouldings and double-depth windows. Randi would like to be somebody else's daughter and a mother to Mirella's son, but isn't wised up enough to understand the complexity of the deceptions involved. There aren't, finally, enough rambling houses and small children to go around. Berne sets up the possibilities for exploring this fundamental inequity, but fails to go much further. Rampant self-delusion requires sacrificial victims, but here the author's tendency towards conservation kicks in. With the novel proceeding via Randi's present-tense narrative and Howard and Mirella's more rooted, measured past tense, a dreadful sense of claustrophobic doom builds up, coming to rest over the children. One gets the impression that while the adults are acting out their barely articulated fantasies, fate is conspiring to bring us an eminently foreseeable catastrophe. But we need not have worried unduly: in the end, the dog gets it. To order this book for pounds 10.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-berne.1 Berne's novel takes as its subject the paranoia of middle-class Americans about who looks after their children. Only a few pages in, Mirella Cook, leaving her husband to interview a new recruit while she begins her commute to a Boston law firm, is troubled by the image of the nanny who "sat in the news day after day, face blank as a dinner roll, beside all those pictures of the poor little boy". Meanwhile, moving slowly towards the household like judgment day is Randi, on the run from her white-trash mother, festooned with faked references and brimming with ideas for creative play and recipes for fried cheese-balls. For Mirella Cook and Howard Goldman, harassed lawyer and dreamy architect, the prospect of happily occupied children and sparkling kitchen surfaces is too much to resist. Each of this trinity of characters is beset by their own yearning, and each is pursing fulfilment by way of deception. While Randi nervously leaps for the phone in order to head her mother off at the pass, Mirella frets over her secret pregnancy and Howard wonders whether that unwise affair with a neurotic former colleague is about to catch up with him. And it is, of course; in the same way that Mirella's stomach will swell and Randi's mother will finally show up on the doorstep. Berne has created an impressively involved scenario to threaten her nuclear family, if not entirely destroy it. What we get is a rather algebraic version of events, with everyone wanting more than they can have or are prepared to pay for. Mirella can't look after the children she already has, but would like more. Howard would like to build lovely houses of quasi-philosophical perfection, but can't find anyone to finance his authentic mouldings and double-depth windows. Randi would like to be somebody else's daughter and a mother to Mirella's son, but isn't wised up enough to understand the complexity of the deceptions involved. There aren't, finally, enough rambling houses and small children to go around. Berne sets up the possibilities for exploring this fundamental inequity, but fails to go much further. - Alex Clark.
Kirkus Review
The stress in a modern-day marriage of opposites is exacerbated by the arrival of a seemingly perfect nannyin a thought-provoking and accomplished second novel by the author of A Crime in the Neighborhood (1997). Lawyer Mirella Cook-Goldman lives in the 350-year-old New England town of New Aylesbury with her architect husband, Howard, and their two small children, five-year-old Pearl and toddler Jacob. With a thriving and demanding practice, a long commute to Boston, a dreamy, unsuccessful husband, a contrary little girl, and a nontalking son morbidly attached to a feathered Indian headdress and a nest hes created in the fireplace, Mirella is clearly overwhelmed. The family has been through two au pairs in as many years, so Randi Gills arrival is cause for celebration. At first Randi seems to the Cook-Goldmans to be what every 21st-century nuclear family needs: a wife. Under her tutelage, Jacob begins to speak, Pearl becomes complacent and cooperative, the kitchen smells of freshly baked cookies. But Berne skillfully sets up an atmosphere of unease by giving Randi her own chapters, told in the first person from her perspective, that reveal her troubled past and disturbing desire to insinuate herself into the family. Neither parent is paying much attention: Howard grapples with a controversial town project and the reappearance of a young colleague with whom he had a brief affair, while Mirella guiltily harbors a secret pregnancy. But then Howards old flame exposes their indiscretion, discrediting him at a town meeting, and Mirella discovers that her baby is actually twin boys. I guess we need to circle the wagons, Howard concludes, and as the bricks start tumbling down, the process of rebuilding family life begins. A literate and intelligent spin on the evil nanny story.
Library Journal Review
Berne's second novel (after A Crime in the Neighborhood) deals with that weak link in the chain that stretches between motherhood and paid work child care. Mirella and Howard Cook-Goldman are fortunate to have found Randi Gill, who seems like the perfect nanny. Not only does she take care of their two children but she also cooks, cleans, and sews. Yet something is wrong with the flawless Midwesterner and her charges. With chilling inevitability, this carefully observed, beautifully written book proceeds to a horrifying finale. Unfortunately, this book may have trouble finding an audience. Young women may dismiss it as fantasy; working mothers, who all have memories nearly as troubling, may not want the reminder; and other will wonder whether the book is arguing that children are safe only with their biological mothers. Despite this drawback, Berne has written a fine book that many readers will find compelling. Judith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll. Lib., Bronxville, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Part I: 1 "She sounded cheery but earnest," Mirella told Howard that morning as she pressed a paper towel into a puddle of milk on Pearl's place mat. "Cheery," said Howard, angled over the newspaper. Mirella sat back and dried her fingers on her napkin. "A homey sort of voice." She looked at her watch, then checked the old walnut case clock by the fireplace, which as usual was slow. It was one of those sulfurous New England spring mornings that had been forecast to be mild but felt clammy instead, and as Mirella glanced from the clock to the window she found herself shivering. "Comforting somehow," she said. The Cook-Goldmans had been hunting for three weeks for a nanny to replace thick-chinned Grete, their second au pair in two years, who had flown home to Uppsala because she missed her boyfriend, Karl. There had been recent letters, sky-blue aerogrammes covered with Karl's blocky print. A midnight phone call, ending in assertive tears. "Karl needs me," Grete had said, her voice tremulous with complacency. They were trying a new child-care agency this time, Family Options Ltd., which specialized in midwestern girls with teaching aspirations. "Could you be comfortable with anything but the best for your family?" queried Family Options' salmon-colored brochure. "Our nannies are dedicated, trained, and sensitive individuals, subject to rigorous screening and psychological evaluation. Guaranteed nationwide FBI criminal fingerprinting and background checks. Drug testing and CPR certification." So far Mirella had not been impressed by the applicants from Family Options. It took two weeks for the agency to produce anyone for an interview-there was a waiting list of families desperate for a nanny, all the agencies said the same-then when Mirella asked the first applicant, a plump brunette from New Jersey, why she enjoyed working with children, the young woman burst into tears and confessed to having an eating disorder. The second, a former nursery school aide, a thin exhausted-looking person in a black straw hat, tripped over the doorstep when she arrived for her interview, then asked Mirella how much she had paid for her house. "Always worry about the cheerful ones." Howard scanned the front page of the paper while snapping Jacob into his overalls. Rain predicted, Mirella read, craning sideways to look at the paper, today and tomorrow. The value of the Japanese yen had plummeted. Independent counsel widens presidential investigation. A shooting at an elementary school outside of Spokane. Jacob flapped his arms, his Indian headdress slipping over one eye. "Blud-a-bub," he said. Then he grunted and went limp in Howard's lap. Mirella found the lid to the jelly jar and screwed it on. "She's been working for a family in Brookline and she used to run some kind of Sunday school program at a church." "Sit up," Howard told Jacob. Mirella took a sip of milky coffee, pausing to watch Jacob flutter his eyelashes. Blink, blink, pause. Blink, blink. A white crust of milk glazed his chin; an amber nugget of snot lodged in one nostril. Of course she worried. Only a year since that Boston nanny sat in the news day after day, face blank as a dinner roll, beside all those pictures of the poor little boy. Six months before, a mother at Pearl's preschool came home to find their nanny drunk in the TV room, the one-year-old asleep upstairs on the changing table. People were installing video recorders now. Worry didn't come near it. Mirella cupped her palms to either side of her face and, for the countless time in the last few weeks, considered what would happen if she forgot about hiring a nanny for Pearl and Jacob, quit work, and stayed home. It could be nice, she thought. Block castles, Play-Doh birthday cakes, afternoons at the park. Immediately a Sahara of days spread across the table, burying the castles and birthday cakes, becoming a quicksand of dirty cups and dishes, hours draining into the laundry basket, trips to the park that took so long to prepare for that by the time everyone was ready, no one wanted to go. Back once more to their own yard-that grainy relief and reluctance as she struggled through the front door and into the hall, loaded like a camel with child, bags, dog leash, stroller. Home again, and again. The cloistered smell of the house becoming her own smell: cold coffee, a diaper left in the wastebasket, the glum reek of last night's fish clinging to the broiling pan left in the sink. She squinted at the finish on the table, stippled with faint gashes wherever the children had drummed their forks and spoons, then looked at her watch again, calculating that she would have an hour to get downtown after dropping off Pearl at preschool. Five minutes to get from her car to the courthouse. Then two meetings after her hearing, tomorrow's deposition to prepare for, Hayman's restraining order to file, a phone conference at three. Thank God, she thought. Jacob had stuck his finger in the butter and was smudging his finger along the table; she reached over and wiped his hand with her napkin, then wiped his nose. "Mmff," he said, twisting his face away. Because the law, unlike her family, was beautifully reducible. The law was simply a set of rules by which human beings governed themselves. That these rules could be complex, sometimes arcane, and-because they were formed out of language-forever open to reinterpretation, accounted for most of their scope and all of their interest. But what Mirella found moving, what had inspired her to become a lawyer in the first place, was the plain human need behind all lawmaking, the desire for guidance and precedent that went straight to a zone that was humanity itself, that might even, she sometimes suspected, be the deepest of all human passions. Not that she had a chance to reflect on the essential purpose of law very often. Her clients, mostly women, were afraid of laws, which they regarded as punitive; they became restless and embarrassed, swiveling on their padded red conference chairs, fiddling with their earrings whenever she tried to discuss philosophical aspects of the legal system. And who could blame them? Usually the people who hired her were either terrified or confused, people who had disappointed other people, often without knowing quite how-abandoned wives, assaulted girlfriends, fired employees. They wanted clear satisfactions: money, vindication. Sometimes they wanted revenge, sometimes protection. Mostly they wanted Mirella to give them whatever it was they needed, as quickly as possible. Jacob stuck his finger again in the butter dish. She reached over and gently pushed the butter dish across the table. Howard was still reading the paper over the top of Jacob's head. "What's her name?" Mirella shifted in her chair. "Sandy. We said ten. Apparently she likes doing crafts. And the woman at the agency said she loves to cook-" "She probably has no legs or something." Blinking herself now, Mirella let the rest of her sentence vanish into the complicated Italian design on her coffee mug. "I didn't mean that about the no legs," he said. Which was only his way, she recognized, a fraction too late, of trying to control what she'd arranged, this interview. Though Howard pretended not to believe in bargaining with fate, he did it all the time. Bargaining, as she well knew, forgiving him already, was what a worried person did to stop worrying. At least for a little while. "Crafts," said Howard musingly. Mirella put down her cup and looked at the dining room's wide brick fireplace, which was crammed with stuffed animals and a pair of beach towels. "So do you think you could tidy up a little before she gets here? Just the downstairs. I don't want her to think we're a bunch of cave dwellers." "Cave dwellers were a civilized culture." Howard fumbled with the last snap on Jacob's overalls. "Why are these things so impossible?" Excerpted from A Perfect Arrangement: A Novel by Suzanne Berne All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
