Burning Down the House

January 25, 2016
Mendelsohn’s (I Was Amelia Earhart) latest begins with a prologue featuring the bitter horror of a Russian girl sold as a sex slave, who eventually becomes the stalwart nanny of the moneyed Zane family. But unfortunately, this glimpse of humanity and strife can’t offset the flat main characters of the novel. Steven, the patriarch, remains one-dimensional, always taking meetings in hotel suites, sounding aggressive on the phone, and reading the Wall Street Journal; he’s exactly like any businessman from any soap opera, whose power sets plot points into motion like dominoes but never comes to life as a particularly complex person. Poppy is his niece, whom he adopted when his sister, her mother, died. After Poppy begins an affair with a close family friend, Steven intervenes in unforeseen dark places of the family empire, for incredibly unlikely reasons. All the while, the Russian nanny is steely and calm, a caricature of resilience. As the Zanes’ world crumbles, the details are well-wrought in Mendelsohn’s articulate voice, but the whole package never departs from the melodramatic.

February 15, 2016
Mendelsohn (American Music, 2010, etc.) tracks the slow and gruesome fall of an elite New York family caught up in the darker side of capitalism. "All families are complicated," Mendelsohn writes, "but because their connections constitute the primary reality that its members know, some families create a world that to them is more comprehensible than the world itself." So it is with the Zanes, less a family than a dynasty, a self-contained empire unto themselves. But while the family pivots on Steve, real estate mogul and family patriarch, the novel swirls around the two young women dearest to him: his 17-year-old adopted daughter, orphaned after his beloved sister's death, and the family nanny, a woman defined by her strength and haunted by her past. Poppy is a sylphlike beauty, precocious and lost; Neva is an outsider, a Russian woman sold into sex slavery as a child, now Steve's unlikely confidante. On the surface, the two are opposites--Poppy is defined by her privilege, Neva by her lack of it--but, as the novel barrels toward its tragic conclusion, their lives overlap in unexpected ways. Extreme wealth is built on the backs of extreme exploitation, the novel argues, whether the people doing the exploiting know it or not. While the dark and twisting plot is heavy on brooding intrigue (international sex trafficking, incest), the book is sharpest when it's dealing with more quotidian concerns (disappointment, aging). For all that they're the focus of the book, Neva and Poppy--complicated as they are--never quite transcend their beautiful, heartbreaking types. Instead, the book gets its emotional heft from its supporting cast: Steve's older daughter, Alix, unfulfilled and bitterly approaching middle age, may not be the heart of the novel, but she is its soul. A family saga about the grotesque underbelly of wealth.

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Starred review from March 1, 2016
In her dramatic fourth novel, an incendiary saga about the Zanes, a grandly wealthy New York family, Mendelsohn (American Music, 2010) revels in surging, hallucinogenic, even baroque language as she conveys the full extent of their flagrant privilege, supernatural decadence, and hidden misery. A close family friend is directing a Broadway musical that combines Talking Heads hits (including the titular song) with Jane Eyre, a tale Mendelsohn loosely aligns with the relationship between the Zane patriarch, Steve, an imposing, ferociously intelligent international mogul, and Neva, the new nanny. Having survived the horror of being taken from her home in the Caucasus and enslaved as a sex worker, Neva, self-possessed, observant, and tough, becomes Steve's most trusted ally, arousing the fury of his morally bankrupt oldest son. The most vulnerable of the Zanes is high-school senior Poppy. Raised as a daughter, she is actually Steve's niece, her mother dead, her father a mystery. Disaffected, pill-popping, and offhandedly neglected, Poppy compares her family to the House of Agamemnon, another clue to the impending conflagration. With gorgeous, feverishly imaginative descriptions of her tormented characters' psyches, and settings ranging from Manhattan to Istanbul to Laos, Mendelsohn, oracular, dazzling, and shocking, creates a maelstrom of tragic failings and crimes, exposing the global reach of the violent sex-trafficking underworld, and excoriating those among the planetary elite who allow it to metastasize.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

October 15, 2015

After his sister's death, Stephen Zane adopts her daughter, who suddenly finds herself enjoying the upper-crust splendor of a family with connections from New York, London, and Rome to points farther east. Meanwhile, a little girl in the Caucasus is sold into the sex trade. The two girls are linked by the Zane family's unwitting involvement in international crime. Mendelsohn had a New York Times best seller with I Was Amelia Earhart, and this work promises to be an eye-opener.

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