My day-to-day unemployment affords me the luxury of reading the paper every morning over breakfast – or at least the local section and any portion of the sports page having to do with the Seahawks – and picking up a book every night before bed, whenever I get “stuck” writing and need a little refresh and reboot, or whenever the story gets to the point where I can’t put the book down. I have spent entire days curled up in the armchair in the living room with a cup or ten of tea and a book.
I recently finished The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine. I picked this book up on the bargain book table at Elliott Bay Books because anything with Westport in the title gets consideration for the fledgling library at our relative’s Westport condo. I quickly discovered it featured the wrong Westport – Connecticut, not Washington – but was intrigued by its characterization as an homage to Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, the glowing words from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal reprinted on the back, and the fact that it was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice – not that I have any idea what that means precisely. For $4.99, I was sold.
After introducing the first three characters, the Sense and Sensibility dynamic is established. There is a man claiming he is being generous but not being so, largely at the direction of a greedy, unscrupulous woman. There are two sisters – the youngest sister featured in Sense and Sensibility is absent here – one is sensible, one is a drama queen. The sisters and their mother are forced to move out of their apartments in New York and into a rundown cottage in Westport, owned by their generous Cousin Lou. A potential Edward Ferrars is introduced as are Willoughby and Colonel Brandon types. A treacherous Lucy figure appears as well. But while the characters are familiar, with the exception of the two sisters, none of them act the way you expect, and Schine introduces new characters to add complexity to her story and, in the case of Mr. Shpuntov, comic relief.
Schine also twists the endings so each relationship and storyline ends in unexpected ways, very different ways than they did in Sense and Sensibility. The result is a familiar tale with twists and turns that make it new and very modern.
Rating: **** A great beach, plane, or weekend read.