Private Means

March 1, 2020
Over the course of a single summer, a middle-aged Manhattan couple grapples with the state of their marriage and their lives. When Alice and Peter met, he was a young psychoanalyst and she was an even younger biophysicist. Soon, they had twin daughters. Now, he is an older psychoanalyst, she is still studying the complexities of starling flock dynamics, the twins are away at Berkeley, and the marriage is on the rocks. They have retreated into separate worlds, bored by themselves and each other. Peter has his work. For Alice, the only source of refuge is her beloved Dachshund-Chihuahua mutt named Maebelle, and when the novel opens on Memorial Day weekend, Maebelle has gone missing. Alice is devastated; Peter is annoyed. Alice has a tryst with a man she meets through a "Manhattan Lost Dog" Facebook group. Peter has escalating fantasies about a beautiful young patient. Both of them agonize, separately, over their mutual indiscretions. Sometimes, they go out to dinner. Every unhappy family may be unhappy in its own way, but it feels as though we've heard this story before. It is an intimate domestic drama presented without subtlety; every action has a clear and obvious motivation, and every motivation is explained at length. Alice's infidelity, we're told, is not just about sex, but rather because "she'd locate a shred of her former self." Peter can't stop fantasizing about the patient, he explains, because she reminds him "of so much I lack." LeFavour (Lights On, Rats Out, 2017) offers an empathetic and detailed portrait of a marriage, but not--with the exception of one explosive scene toward the novel's end--an especially insightful one. A familiar tale of upper-middle-class ennui.

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April 1, 2020

DEBUT Alice and Peter are enjoying an enviable upper-middle-class existence in Manhattan, yet they are unhappy. Alice is a scientist studying the physics of starling murmurations, but her intellectual pursuits are merely amateur; motherhood intervened just after she received her PhD, throwing her off the academic track. Her husband, Peter, is a prominent psychoanalyst, but lately he's been suffering from burnout. The couple are recent empty-nesters--their twin daughters are in college across the country at Berkeley--and the marriage has gone cold. Worse, Alice's beloved dog has been lost by an incompetent dog walker. Alice is at crisis level when she meets a handsome stranger at a dog owners' group. The novel's point of view flits adroitly between husband and wife as they overthink their problems in a fuzz of psychobabble. VERDICT LeFavour, author of the memoir Lights On, Rats Out, is an award-winning cookbook writer, but don't expect a foodie novel. Fans of Taffy Brodesser-Akner's Fleishman Is in Trouble or Ann Beattie's short stories will enjoy this wry, sophisticated, and intelligent rendering of modern, privileged city life. [See Prepub Alert, 12/9/19.]--Reba Leiding, emerita, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

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May 1, 2020
Alice and Peter's empty nest gets even emptier with the disappearance of their (mostly Alice's) trusty little mutt, Maebelle. Sometime after their twin daughters left for college in the fall, animal-behavior researcher Alice and psychiatrist Peter started sleeping in separate bedrooms. Beginning on Memorial Day, LeFavour's (Lights On, Rats Out, 2017) first novel spans one summer as Alice determines to find Maebelle before the girls come home for a Labor Day visit. In a weirdly alienating meeting with fellow Manhattanites seeking lost dogs, Alice meets too-good-to-be-true George and their night of passion intoxicates her long after the fact. Peter, meanwhile, nurses a complicating interest of his own in Lisbeth, his beautiful young patient, and comes into unknowing contact with George. In this lifelike, charming, and witty portrayal of mostly-well-mannered marriage doldrums, LeFavour lets Alice and Peter unleash their inner storms onto the page long before they act on them. Their paramours become ciphers for all they think they've lost in one another, and the opposition between their respective sciences?and themselves?turns out to be a mirror.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

June 22, 2020
Cookbook writer LeFavour (Fish) follows a married New York City couple’s deteriorating relationship in this lackluster tale. Peter, a psychoanalyst, and Alice, an academic in search of her next grant, have become empty-nesters upon the departure of their twin daughters. Left alone with their tension, the couple stops sharing a bed. Then their dog, Maebelle, goes missing, and Alice’s search for her irritates Peter. Each grapples with what is left of their relationship over the course of a summer, which takes them from the city to friends’ summer homes, including an idyllic colonial in the Hudson Valley, where their visit is marred by the still-missing dog. In a support group for those who’ve lost their dogs, Alice meets a man who understands her; Peter, meanwhile, indulges in fantasies about a young patient. While LeFavour leans on clichés about the male and female psyches, and on the awkward tic of starting too many sentences the same way (“Running,” “Focusing,” “Trying,” “Waiting”), the narrative credibly shows how the characters are driven from the confines of their relationship by their desires. In the end, LeFavour misses the mark in this middling domestic tale.