Vicki H

Family disfunction? Housebreaking offers the hard way of coping: literally dismantling your old life by tearing down your childhood home, shingle by shingle. The misanthropic Del here is so committed to making life hard on herself that I was reminded of characters like Eleanor in 'Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine' and May Attaway in 'Rules For Visiting.'

Read for the quirky moments as unwanted guests and family try to talk her out of it, then insist on helping and worm their way through her defenses. Del has her most human moments with the gay friends of her dead father, and with a young gay man: a nice window on gay-adjacent life.

Read for a coming-of-age moment when someone who quits all the time … learns she absolutely won't quit on this one thing.

Read for that liminal state between school and adulthood when one foot is in each world and strange things are possible.

This dark psychological study puts the reader wrongfooted early on — something's 'off,' isn't it? — and pronto, we're strapped in for a Hitchcockian scare-ride of paranoia, hallucination, and a wee bit of kleptomania.

Mrs March (what happened in your dark childhood, dear?) is all about that M-R-S. That title and all it means gets a slap upside the head as the book begins.

Once that the pedestal she's built for herself is jostled, Mrs March wobbles wider and wider until the inevitable spectacular crash. (Inevitable, yet I didn't see it coming. The ending packs a surprising wallop.)

I loved the dark paranoia, the invitation into 80s NYC, the hint of The Yellow Wallpaper, the walls-closing-in feel. It's such a fascinating page turner, no wonder the movie's already planned

If readers of DeWitt's The Sisters Brothers said it seemed like a Coen Brothers movie, his French Exit falls more into the Wes Anderson camp.  Our characters here are so unconventional, so outré, they deserve Anderson's kitsch.

Here are two hard-to-like characters — all their choices are wrong, they are not being redeemed in any way by their changing circumstances — and yet I couldn't put the book down. Though their behavior is abominable, Frances and Malcolm are wildly entertaining. Was I wooed by the fresh and witty dialog? Was I frantic to learn how far off the road these two would drive? Or did I just want to see them get their comeuppance?  DeWitt simply had me in "the pull of a well-told story." 

The ride got bumpy for me when the book reached Paris. Every reader is asked by an author to "carry" scenes and characters "up the hill" of a book. We gladly do it, hoping there's a payoff in the end for all the details we've dutifully ferried. I grew worried, two-thirds of the way through, that I was not going to get a satisfying "wrap up." Indeed, I didn't. But DeWitt was such a great storyteller that it made the hike worthwhile.  I was reminded a bit of Kingsley's Amis's Lucky Jim .... but mostly of Wes Anderson movies. Such is the surreality.