The Unfortunates

July 6, 2015
McManus's first novel is a biting satire of the idle rich. Cecilia "CeCe" Somner, a rubber industry heiress in her 70s, enters an experimental clinical trial to cure her Parkinson's-like tremors. While she is away, her troubled adult son, George, spends his time writing the libretto for a dystopian opera. When he can't find anyone to produce it, he tells his wife, Iris, a onetime punk musician, that he will raise the money on his own. His sister lives in Rio with her architect wife and refuses to visit CeCe because she is pregnant and they are estranged. As CeCe goes through her clinical trial, George neglects his job working for an arts foundation in order to finish his opera. Unfortunate choices are made, with terrible repercussions for CeCe, George, and Iris that perhaps not even vast sums of money can rectify. The author writes with subtle wit about the culturally isolated 1% and sends up the gargoyle-esque CeCe, who is out of step with contemporary society. This leaves readers to identify with Iris, the outsider to this world of incredible, indecent privilege. Only near the end does McManus falter in asking us to see the fates visited upon her characters as tragic. Despite this, she has found a new way to dramatize Fitzgerald's oft-quoted statement, "The rich are different from you and me."

March 15, 2015
The decline and fall of a wealthy family, including a clinical drug trial, insider trading, subprime mortgages, and a terrible opera.McManus is a talented prose stylist, but her first book might better be called The Unpleasants. Extremely wealthy, boorish, self-centered, emotionally handicapped people who behave awfully to each other, the mother and son at the center of this story are not appealing enough to sustain a novel. Cecilia Somner, the matriarch, spends most of the novel in a care facility, where she's participating in the trial of a drug that will hopefully cure her Parkinson's-like disease. The pills cause a murderous impatience: "This side effect's most seductive feature is how it imitates the wicked pleasure she used to take in discovering the weakest edge of a person, the pleasure of saying something truthful and unkind. A part of herself she'd meant to protect her children from. Only, had she?" Based on the behavior of her son, George, and daughter, Patricia, one would think not. George is a mess of a man whose family fortune has fixed everything in his life, starting with a rape or near-rape he committed as an undergraduate at Yale. He's since married a coat-check girl he met on a golf vacation, and poor Iris will soon be stuck with far more than she can handle as her delusional husband writes a sexist, racist, and downright horrible opera and secretly finances its New York production with huge personal loans. Iris is supposed to be the sympathetic member of the clan, but she doesn't quite gel. The book insists she didn't marry George for his money but never makes any other reason plausible. She already has the affections of the only appealing character of the lot: a big red dog named 3D. The rich are not like you and me, but if they're as awful as they are in this book, God help them.

May 15, 2015
In her assured first novel, McManus dissects such headline topics as Wall Street corruption, income inequality, and the vagaries of class and power in contemporary America. Cecilia Somner is an elderly matriarch and a larger-than-life figurean heiress, no less. But CeCe, as she is called, is on her way down the economic and social ladder. Her health is failing, and her son, George, has troubles of his own, while his wife, Iris, doesn't quite fit in. McManus reveals the fate of the Somners with equal parts cruelty and sympathy. The corrupting power of wealth is a familiar trope in literature, but McManus dramatizes it with a fresh eye. Although the rich may be different from you and meto reference F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous observationthat doesn't mean they are any less human. To her great credit, McManus uncovers the humanity of a group that rarely receives our empathy even as she exposes the dark side of privilege and entitlement in a timely novel enriched with touches of Edith Wharton.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2015

She may be heiress to a robber baron's fortune, but grand dame Cecilia Somner can't fend off the realities of modern life, her family's dark legacy, or the rare disease with which she is afflicted. "Quite impressively accomplished," says the publicist of this debut.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2015

George Somner, a poor little rich boy who has never amounted to anything, is nearing middle age. His mother, the elegant heiress Cecilia ("CeCe") is a fixture in East Coast society who has bailed George out of trouble all his life. Now CeCe has reached her late seventies and is panic-stricken when facing a debilitating disease. She enrolls in a clinical trial for an experimental drug that seems to give her a new lease on life. George has found a wife, Iris, who though lower-middle-class doesn't appear to be a gold digger; she's genuinely fond of her husband. Then George's behavior becomes more erratic. He writes a libretto for an opera, which critics soon savage as a politically incorrect vanity project. Things go rapidly downhill, with subplots involving big pharma, insider trading, and shady real estate deals. VERDICT This debut novel could have been more streamlined (too many pages are devoted to George's opera), but this convincing look at life among "the unfortunate" upper class gives fresh insight into the old adage that money can't buy happiness. [See Prepub Alert, 12/15/14.]--Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.