Issue: April 1, 2010
Galant's third novel (following Fear and Yoga in New Jersey, 2008) delivers wit, charm, and characters who feel like next-door neighbors. Married couple Ivy and Ellis share duties in narrating the story of their 20-year relationship in alternating chapters that chronicle various episodes in their life together-from their initial meeting in New York in the early 1980s, to a house hunt gone awry, to a family death. Galant subtitles each chapter with the year and the car that was driven at the time, a device that could have become cumbersome but instead remains loose and natural. Ivy is a neurotic southern transplant to the New Jersey suburbs who hates to drive and stays home with their two daughters, while Ellis is an entertainment executive who finds himself away from home more and more. By fast-forwarding between each chapter to a new year, and skipping some major events in between, the novel creates an appropriate sense of time flying by, with quarrels unresolved and emotions lying stagnant underneath the polished veneer of a strained suburban marriage.
- Annie Tully
