The Invaders

May 4, 2015
A middle-aged woman clinging to the tattered edges of her marriage strikes up an unlikely friendship with her stepson, a drug-addicted Ivy League expellee, in this inviting but superficial novel by Waclawiak (How to Get into the Twin Palms). Set in fictional Little Neck Cove, along Connecticut’s private beach–chocked Long Island Sound shore, the novel opens with a small disaster—co-protagonist Cheryl is accosted on a nature trail and attacks her harasser, a local young man, damaging his face—and careers toward a much larger one: a hurricane that threatens to deface the postcard-perfect community. Cheryl, who has ascended from outlet-mall clerk to pastel-clad housewife, resents her neighbors, who harbor irrational fears about trespassers. Meanwhile, her husband’s son, Teddy, tries to imagine a future for himself amid a cloud of pills and booze, until his antics culminate in a humiliating (and possibly permanent) injury. Car wrecks on tennis courts, affairs between neighbors, and drunken spats at the country club: this material may be well-worn but it’s always worth revisiting. Waclawiak’s treatment of it, however, too often dissolves into clichéd black-and-white moralizing. Of an out-of-place fisherman, one local woman says, “He’s Mexican. We have to do something.” The effect here is to perpetuate, rather than complicate, received notions among the suburban upper crust.

April 15, 2015
Twisted, depressed characters are up to no good in a tony East Coast beach town. "Each time they put up big white signs welcoming people to LITTLE NECK COVE, A CONNECTICUT BEACH ENCLAVE, they were set on fire or spray-painted. The new homes that were being built on Spruce were vandalized. Everyone thought it was townies....But it wasn't them. It was us: me, Joe, Steven, Chucky, and Rob. That's what was so funny. It was us all along-their own children doing it to them." This is Teddy speaking, one of two unlikable narrators of this creepy story of suburban dysfunction and violence. Just kicked out of Dartmouth, Teddy has rolled home to live with his father, Jeffrey, and stepmother, Cheryl, a much younger retail clerk Jeffrey married after ditching Teddy's mother-who fell drunkenly to her death off a pier a few months later. In any case, folks are not welcoming anyone to Little Neck Cove anymore. As the story opens, the two-dimensional country-club ladies who populate the "enclave" are throwing fits about the local men who come to fish from the rocks each morning. Once aggressive measures are taken to keep out these potential intruders, who are in fact totally harmless, Little Neck's denizens are hemmed in by a massive, gleaming white fence. Behind it, things go south as the bored, drunk, pill-popping head cases of the community torment, maim, and sexually harass each other. Subtly edged out and ostracized by the other women, abandoned by her husband, haunted by her past, Cheryl becomes increasingly alienated and unmoored and rushes, in her muffled and deadpan way, toward the story's apocalyptic denouement. This would-be dark comedy of manners will be too dark for some.

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June 1, 2015
Those tony beach communities that dot the flaunted real estate along the Connecticut and Long Island coasts have long been the source of wonder and desire. Inside their gates, however, things are hardly the stuff of such lust-filled dreams. Petty rivalries escalate between neighbors, paranoia over outsiders' access to their beachfront vistas fuel violent turf wars, and those old stand-bys drugs, alcohol, and sex destroy marriages and livelihoods. Told from the alternating points-of-view of Cheryl, a down-market trophy wife, and Teddy, her dissolute stepson, Waclawiak's novel exposes the underpinnings of Little Neck Cove for what they are: paltry, superficial facades that poorly mask any semblance of charity, tolerance, or humanity. As Cheryl's marriage dissolves and Teddy's addiction causes a life-changing accident, an impending hurricane destined to hit the community pales in comparison to the inner storms already brewing. With its spot-on characterizations, droll dialogue, and staccato pacing, Waclawiak's dark satire is a trenchant indictment of the country club set tempered by compassionately rendered portraits of two of its not entirely unwitting victims.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)