Our Kind: A Novel
in Stories
By Kate Walbert
Scribner, 195 pp., $23
These beautiful, heartbreaking stories focus on a group of women who came of age, married, and had children in the wealthy suburbs in the 1950s. Schooled in "the three Gs: Grooming, Grammar, and Grace," they went on to follow the pattern of life "like the pattern on the bone china handed down and handed down, again." The pattern provides some solace and comfort but mostly boredom and regret.
In the most moving story, "Back When They Were Children," the women recall their daughters sledding with rosy cheeks and mittened fingers or parading proudly in decorated party hats. Now the girls are gone, unknowable, terrifying in their distance and strangeness. Viv recalls with remorse the scholarship she turned down in favor of marriage in "The Beginning of the End." Megan, the ungainly daughter who committed suicide, haunts several stories, while Walter, the one loving and beloved husband, brightens the general romantic gloom of many others. The women, once rich and married, have been left by husbands for other women. Alone with the houses, pools, and tennis courts, they have pulled together, playing cards and golf, attending lectures, visiting each other in sickness, consoling each other after losses. They are free and unfettered; they could do anything. But they do very little; they huddle together in the cold, wearing cardigans, smoking, waiting.
Bergdorf Blondes
By Plum Sykes
Miramax, 320 pp., $23.95
The plot of this adorable and informative novel is straight out of Jane Austen -- the girl with the pure heart lands the boy with the prime real estate. But the setting is Park Avenue, New York, now. The unnamed heroine of the story chronicles the doings of her set: the PAPs, or Park Avenue Princesses, and FRGs, or Front Row Girls (as in front row at the Paris couture shows). These girls spend their days getting French manicures, Brazilian bikini waxes, and Alpha-Beta peels and their nights attending charity balls, art gallery openings, and restaurant reinventions, all with one purpose in mind -- to secure a PH, a prospective husband. For these girls, life's experiences can be divided into two categories, "icky" and "glam."