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Product Details
Publisher: Scribner
Release date: February 1, 2011
Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
Number of Pages: 320 pages
ISBN-10: 1439191859
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 260923
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Exclusive: Aryn Kyle Reviews The AdultsAryn Kyle is the author of Boys and Girls Like You and Me and The God of Animals.
While I was reading this novel, I found myself carrying it around with me so that I could read bits of it aloud to my friends. "Listen to this line," I would tell them. "Listen to this paragraph." Alison Espach doesn’t just understand the thrills and terrors and confusion that make up that rocky, winding path between childhood and adulthood, but she manages to convey them with such perfect pitch, such authenticity and humor and tenderness, that I found myself returning to passages again and again, simply for the pleasure of reading her prose. "Listen to the way she describes this scene," I told my friends. "Listen to the way she starts this chapter." "Listen to the way she ends it."
The Adults follows Emily Vidal, a sharp-eyed but sensitive girl, from early adolescence into early adulthood. As the novel opens, the cozy world of Emily’s affluent Connecticut upbringing begins to simultaneously dissolve and expand with the divorce of her parents. While her mother and father struggle to restructure their lives without each other, Emily is left to navigate her increasingly complicated world mostly on her own.
Coming-of-age stories seem to be a dime a dozen, maybe because everybody has one: We all grow up. Well, we try.
What makes The Adults unique is also, I believe, what makes it universal: The book froths with the frenetic energy of adolescence, the giddiness and the fear, the nastiness and vulnerability, the humor so deftly juxtaposed with the heartbreak that within the span of a single paragraph I would find myself laughing out loud, then aching with sadness.
There’s a fearlessness about Espach’s writing, an authority that makes this novel, once started, almost impossible to put down. The real accomplishment of The Adults, however, is not the unflinching insights or the razor-edged prose, but the underlying tenderness Espach conveys for her characters. These are deeply flawed and wounded people, characters that might, in less capable hands, be difficult to like and easy to judge. But through small moments and brief encounters, Espach expertly portrays the vast complexities of all her characters, making them loveable even when they’re not especially likable.
This is an honest and brutally funny novel about choices and mistakes, acceptance and forgiveness, about the people we love and the people we leave as we pass from childhood into adulthood. Whatever that might be.
Photo Credit: Miriam BerkleyFrom Publishers Weekly
In Espach's charming coming-of-age debut, 14-year-old Emily Vidal's life begins to veer off course at her father's 50th birthday party when he announces that he and her mother are divorcing. The birthday night ends with dad kissing the neighbor, Mrs. Resnick, in the woods, where Emily and Mrs. Resnick's son, Mark, discover them. The disorienting discoveries continue: Mark's ailing father commits suicide, and Mrs. Resnick is pregnant with Emily's dad's baby. With dad off to Prague and her mother undone by the affair and hitting the bottle, Emily loses faith in all the adults around her, even as she is becoming one of them. Emily starts an affair with an English teacher 10 years her senior, mostly to see how far she can go, which turns out to be pretty far. She and the teacher, Jonathan, who leaves teaching to become a lawyer, return to each other again and again as Emily graduates from college and moves to Prague to be with her father. Espach perfects the snarky, postironic deadpan of the 1990s and teenagers everywhere, and her ear for modern speech and eye for fresh detail transform a familiar story into an education in what it means to be a grown-up. (Apr.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review
“Coming of age with a quick wit and a sharp eye…The Adults is as idiosyncratic as it is stirring.” -New York Times
A “razor sharp debut novel…a wry, devastatingly funny coming-of-age tale.” —Marie Claire
A “fierce, tender adolescent narrative.” –The New York Times Book Review
“This cri de coeur carries a freshness and charm.” —San Francisco Chronicle
Product Description
In her ruefully funny and wickedly perceptive debut novel, Alison Espach deftly dissects matters of the heart and captures the lives of children and adults as they come to terms with life, death, and love.
At the center of this affluent suburban universe is Emily Vidal, a smart and snarky teenager, who gets involved in a suspect relationship with one of the adults after witnessing a suicide in her neighborhood. Among the cast of unforgettable characters is Emily’s father, whose fiftieth birthday party has the adults descending upon the Vidal’s patio; her mother, who has orchestrated the elaborate party even though she and her husband are getting a divorce; and an assortment of eccentric neighbors, high school teachers, and teenagers who teem with anxiety and sexuality and an unbridled desire to be noticed, and ultimately loved.
An irresistible chronicle of a modern young woman’s struggle to grow up, The Adults lays bare—in perfect pitch—a world where an adult and a child can so dangerously be mistaken for the same exact thing.About the Author
Alison Espach is a graduate of the Washington University in St. Louis MFA program. Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Five Chapters, Glamour and other magazines. She grew up in Connecticut and now teaches creative writing in New York.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
They arrived in bulk, in Black Tie Preferred, in one large clump behind our wooden fence, peering over each other’s shoulders and into our backyard like people at the zoo who wanted a better view of the animals.
My father’s fiftieth birthday party had just begun.
It’s true that I was expecting something. I was fourteen, my hair still sticky with lemon from the beach, my lips maroon and pulpy and full like a woman’s, red and smothered like “a giant wound,” my mother said earlier that day. She disapproved of the getup, of my yellow fit-and-flare dress that cradled my hips and pointed my breasts due north, but I didn’t care; I disapproved of this party, this whole at-home affair that would mark the last of its kind.
The women walked through the gate in black and blue and gray and brown pumps, the party already proving unsuccessful at the grass level. The men wore sharp dark ties like swords and said predictable things like, “Hello.”
“Welcome to our lawn,” I said back, with a goofy grin, and none of them looked me in the eye because it was rude or something. I was too yellow, too embarrassing for everyone involved, and I inched closer to Mark Resnick, my neighbor, my maybe-one-day-boyfriend.
I stood up straighter and overemphasized my consonants. There were certain ways you had to position and prepare your body for high school, and I was slowly catching on, but not fast enough. Every day, it seemed, I had to say good-bye to some part of myself; like last week at the beach, my best friend, Janice, in her new shoestring bikini, had looked down at my Adidas one-piece and said, “Emily, you don’t need a one-piece anymore. This isn’t a sporting event.” But it sort of was. You could win or lose at anything when you were fourteen, and Janice was keeping track of this. First person to say “cunt” in two different languages (Richard Trenton, girls’ bathroom, cunnus, kunta), an achievement that Ernest Bingley decried as invalid since “Old Norse doesn’t count as a language!” (Ernest Bingley, first person ever to cry while reading a poem aloud in English class, “Dulce et Decorum Est”). There were other competitions as well, competitions that had only losers, like who’s got the fattest ass (Annie Lars), the most cartoonish face (Kenneth Bentley), the most pubes (Janice Nicks).
“As a child, I shaved the hair off my Barbies to feel prettier,” Janice had confessed earlier that morning at the beach.
She sighed and wiped her brow as though it was the August heat that made her too honest, but Connecticut heat was disappointingly civil. So were our confessions.
“That’s nothing,” I said. “As a child, I thought my breasts were tumors.” I whispered, afraid the adults could hear us.
Janice wasn’t impressed.
“Okay, as a child, I sat out in the sun and waited for my blood to evaporate,” I said. I admitted that, sometimes, I still believed blood could vanish like boiling water or a puddle in the middle of summer. But Janice was already halfway into her next confession, admitting that last night, she touched herself and thought of our middle school teacher Mr. Heller despite everything, even his mustache. “Which we can’t blame him for,” Janice said. “I thought of Mr. Heller’s hands and then waited, and then nothing. No orgasm.”
“What’d you expect?” I said, shoving a peanut in my mouth. “He’s so old.”
At the beach, the adults always sat ten feet behind our towels. We carefully measured the distance in footsteps. My mother and her friends wore floppy straw hats and reclined in chairs patterned with Rod Stewart’s face and neon ice cream cones and shouted, “Don’t stick your head under!” as Janice and I ran to the water’s edge to cool our feet. My mother said sticking your head in the Long Island Sound was like dipping your head in a bowl of cancer, to which I said, “You shouldn’t say ‘cancer’ so casually like that.” A woman who volunteered with my mother at Stamford Hospital, the only woman there who had not gotten a nose job from my neighbor Dr. Trenton, held her nose whenever she said “Long Island Sound” or “sewage,” as if there was no difference between the two things. But the more everybody talked about the contamination, the less I could see it; the farther I buried my body in the water, the more the adults seemed to be wrong about everything. It was water, more and more like water every time I tested it with my tongue.
Our backyard was so full of tiger lilies, nearly every guest at the party got their own patch to stand near. Mark ran his hands over the orange flower heads, while my mother opened her arms to greet his mother, Mrs. Resnick.
My mother and Mrs. Resnick had not spoken in months for no other reason than they were neighbors who did not realize they had not spoken in months.
“Italians hug,” my mother said.
“We’re Russian Jewish,” Mrs. Resnick said.
“Oh, that’s dear,” my mother said, and looked at me. “Say hello, Emily.”
“Hello,” I said.
It was unknown how long it had been since they borrowed an egg from each other, but it didn’t even matter because my mother noticed how tall Mark had become. “Very tall,” my mother said.
“Yes, isn’t he tall?” Mrs. Resnick asked.
“How tall are you, Mark?” my mother asked.
Everybody suspected he was taller than he used to be, but shorter than our town councilwoman, Mrs. Trenton, who was so tall she looked like King Kong in a belted pink party dress observing a mushroom garlic cream tart for the first time. She was so tall it only made sense she was granted a position of authority in our town, my mother said once. And Mark was a little bit shorter than that, in a very small, unnoticeable way.
Most of the adults stood at the bar. Some reported flying in from Prague, Geneva, Moscow, and couldn’t believe the absurdity of international travel—it took so long to get from here to there, especially when all you were doing over the Atlantic was worrying about blood clots, feeling everything clumping and slowing and coming to an end. Some needed to use the bathroom. Some couldn’t believe how the roads were so wide here in Connecticut and, honestly, what did we need all that space for?
“It’s presumptuous,” said Mrs. Resnick. She took a sip of her martini while a horsefly flew out of her armpit. “So much space and nothing to do but take care of it.”
I looked around at the vastness of my yard. It was the size of two pools, and yet, we didn’t even have one. My mother had joked all summer long that if my father wanted to turn fifty, he would have to do the damn thing outside on the grass. We had all laughed around the dinner table, and with a knife in my fist, I shouted out, “Like the dog!”
“If we had one . . . ,” my father said, correcting me.
“It’s the nineties,” my mother added. “Backyards in Connecticut are just starting to come back in style.”
But soon, it turned out it wasn’t a joke at all, and at any given moment my mother could be caught with a straight face saying things like, “We’ll need to get your father a tent in case of rain,” and after I hung up on Timmy’s Tent Rental, she started saying things like, “We’ll need three hundred and fifty forks,” and my father and I started exchanging secret glances, and when my mother saw him scribble THAT’S A LOT OF FORKS to me on a Post-it, she started looking at us blankly, like my father was the fridge and I was the microwave, saying, “We’ll need a theme.”
“Man, aging dramatically!” I shouted at them across the marble kitchen counter.
“And a cake designed to look like an investment banker.” She wrote it down on a list, her quick cursive more legible than my print.
“No! A map of Europe!” I said. “And everybody has to eat their own country!”
“No, Emily,” my mother said. “That’s not right either.”
Everybody was invited. Was Alfred available? Alfred was our neighbor who always gave the comical speech about my father’s deep-seated character flaws at every social event that was primarily devoted to my father, which was every event my mother attended.
“Like how he questions my choice of hat at seven thirty in the morning,” my mother said, as though my father wasn’t there pouring himself some cereal. “It’s just that the brim is so notably wide, he says. Well, that’s the point, Victor!”
Or how he called the Prague office with a mouthful of Cocoa Puffs every morning and my mother said, Victor, you’re a millionaire, that’s gross, and my father chomped louder, said, it’s puffed rice. He just doesn’t get it, my mother said. He walks out to the car every morning and comes back in asking me how is it that a car can get so dirty!
At some point, they always turned to me, the third party. “Emily, would you explain to your father?” my mother asked.
“Well, Jesus, Victor! We drive it!” I shouted. I never considered the possibility that we weren’t joking.
“Isn’t Emily so beautiful?” my mother asked Mrs. Resnick, twisting her gold tennis bracelet around her wrist.
My mother asked this question everywhere we went. The grocery store. The mall. The dentist. Nobody had yet disagreed, though the opinion of the dentist was still pending.
“Don’t you think that if the dentist really thinks I am beautiful he can notice it on his own?” I had asked my mother once, fed up with the prompt. “Don’t you think pointing it...
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