Product Description

Isabelle, a woman in her thirties without any of the trappings of a grown-up life, has just been fired from her job at a San Francisco phone company. Returning to the midwestern suburb of her childhood, Standardsville, Illinois, she contends with her dating single mother, a neighbor who once appeared on The Honeymooners, and an ex-boyfriend. She also becomes a mystery shopper for a temp agency, posing as a variety of potential tenants for newly built suburban communities to access their exclusive services.

Enchanted by the possiblities of disguise, Isabelle spins a web of lies that keeps the world at a distance until she unearths long-kept secrets that force her to rethink everything she thought she knew.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2680365 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-01
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Striving for humor and poignancy, but never quite achieving either, this first novel finds 33-year-old Isabelle living at home with her mother in the dull Midwestern suburb of her youth. The by-now familiar setup of sexy single mom and cynical product-of-the-'70s offspring presents ample opportunity for Casey to lampoon the trappings of contemporary existence among them dating services, office jobs and highway psychics and to bend her lead character's casual observations into meditations on life so far. After a failed attempt to find a more glamorous existence in San Francisco, Isabelle retreats to Standardsville, Ill., a land of strip malls and cul-de-sacs, and signs on with a rather dubious temp agency. Her overzealous temp agent and peeping-tom neighbor join the cast of quirky characters sketched in broad strokes. Several coincidental encounters and sudden shifts in plot prevent the book from taking itself too seriously, but also keep it from being believable as a portrait of American suburbia. Rarely does Casey's satire dig much deeper than assigning silly names to places of business (Temporama, Let's Pet, En Queso Emergency, etc.), and when the author attempts to build emotional tension, she relies on the inherent pathos of suicide and failed dreams rather than on any real feeling for her characters. With no apparent connection to the 1933 H.G. Wells novel of the same name, and no new insights into contemporary loserdom, this novel is too heavily laden with its own absurdities to say much about those outside its confines; its greatest appeal lies in Isabelle's earnest search for meaning. Agent, Alice Tasman, Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency. 4-city author tour.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Casey deftly writes about the struggle out of the tomb, the restoration of sanity, the search for a small peace. -- Mark Richard

"Casey is very good at creating characters who are torn between the strong emotions they experience . . . " -- Ann Beattie

"Full of lovely sentences, empathetic characters. This story is as engaging and scintillating as one told by a best friend. -- Darcey Steinke

"Isabelle is a millennial treasure. The journey from child to woman . . . is poignant and funny.". -- Anne Rivers Siddons

"Isabelle is so vivacious that even though she's utterly confused about her future, we know it'll turn out just fine." -- Redbook

"Maud Casey's accomplished first novel, takes up with the endearingly subversive Isabelle . . . -- Elle

"This is a wonderful account of our need to both invent and reinvent ourselves. A deft and generous book. -- Margot Livesey

Casey is a stand-up philosopher posing vexing questions about human existence. She's funny, inventive…dazzling narrative dare. -- The New York Times Book Review

Complex, mature and compelling. -- The Chicago Tribune

Review
"Casey deftly writes about the struggle out of the tomb, the restoration of sanity, the search for a small peace. (Mark Richard )

"Casey is very good at creating characters who are torn between the strong emotions they experience . . . " (Ann Beattie )

"Isabelle is a millennial treasure. The journey from child to woman . . . is poignant and funny.". (Anne Rivers Siddons )

"This is a wonderful account of our need to both invent and reinvent ourselves. A deft and generous book. (Margot Livesey )

"A startling debut. [Casey's] fresh voice emerges like a song that's bound to be a hit." (Virginia Quarterly Review )

"Maud Casey's accomplished first novel, takes up with the endearingly subversive Isabelle . . . (Elle )

"Casey is a stand-up philosopher posing vexing questions about human existence. She's funny, inventive.dazzling narrative dare." (The New York Times Book Review )

"Complex, mature and compelling." (The Chicago Tribune )

"Isabelle is so vivacious that even though she's utterly confused about her future, we know it'll turn out just fine." (Redbook )

"Full of lovely sentences, empathetic characters. This story is as engaging and scintillating as one told by a best friend. (Darcey Steinke )

Customer Reviews

"all the lonely people, where do they come from?"
While reading Maud Casey's provocative, maddening and satiric debut novel, "The Shape of Things to Come," readers may well find themselves realizing that the Beatles' Eleanor Rigby is reborn in literature. Thirty-ish Isabelle, whose shambles of a life catapults her back to her frighteningly lifeless hometown, symbolizes the terrible hollowness and futility of modern suburban life. Everythng Casey describes about Standardsville, Illinois, is designed to both mock and shock. Casey knows how to blend morbid humor and genuine pathos; the very quality of Isabelle's existence is irritatingly pathetic. Simultaneously, the protagonist repels and attracts as she struggles to find some kind of meaning to a life that is desperately hollow.

Even Isabelle's employment is pretense; she acts as a mystery shopper whose duty is to discover hidden facts about movie theatres or trendy apartment complexes. Donning disguises under the breathless encouragement of her temp-job supervisor, Isabelle has no more clue as to her ultimate destination as she does the personalities she half-heartedly adopts in her undercover "work." Presumably, work in America should be fulfilling, purposeful and productive. In Standardsville, Isabelle's employment is sterile, duplicitous and pointless. It is small wonder that she wanders through the novel as if stunned.

Her attempts at relationships fare no better. Isabelle's mother Adeline is a modern-day dating machine. Methodically working her way through every single man in the city, Adeline's existential hunger is never satisfied by male companionship. So desperate is she for companionship that Adeline never stops to consider what human connection or intimacy is. Rare mother-daughter conversations invariably return to the central theme of their lives: an inexorable shabby loneliness.

The two men in Isabelle's life are a ying-yang of frustration, isolation and failure. A renewed relationship with her former boyfriend, Duncan, bounces between attraction, rejection and misperception. A lifelong sufferer of Standardsville, Duncan fights against his attraction to Isabelle, ultimately succumbing to his need to reignite the miniscule passion which existed between the two some twenty years previous. Isabelle's bizarre neighbor, Raymond, deserves his own chapter in a college textbook on abnormal psychology. His involvement with both Isabelle and Adeline provide insight into the quiet, disintegrative aspects of suburban living.

Despite its satiric insights and vivid characterizations, Maud Casey's "The Shape of Things to Come" never gains traction. It is as if the author could not make up her own mind as to the ultimate objective of her own work. Biting criticism of suburbia cannot permit much sympathy for a protagonist whose adult life reeks of aimlessness. Yet Casey wants the reader to feel for and with Isabelle. Any author who creates Mexican restaurants with names such as "En Queso Emergency" should not dabble in maudlin sentimentality. That grating deficiency weakens an otherwise absorbing, energetic novel.

Things to come are very promising
As a resident of a town much like Standardville, Illinois, I began Maud Casey's book with a mixture of interest and apprehension. Would this novel be the product of an uninformed writer, imagining what the Midwest was like? Or would it capture critical, but sympathetic, impressions of living in a part of the country that is far from glamorous yet fully human? I'm happy to say that I found the latter. The Shape of Things to Come is an often humorous, always thoughtful, coming-of-age (and reflective of coming-of-age) novel about a woman who, despite her efforts to the contrary, finds that she can get beyond destructive self-absorption and might even become a person with whom she can be content.

Casey's prose is a delight, and the book is easy to read in the very best sense of that quality. She doesn't strive to impress you with the profundity and depth of every sentence, nor seem to want you to struggle, as if you have to earn the right to finish the book. Yet her command of language and dialogue is clear, and she does want you to care about every character, no matter how quirky. I did.

I had the good fortune to hear a reading by Casey when she came to a nearby bookstore. Her affect and unassuming charm were as impressive as her literary talent. I look forward to her next novel, whatever it may be.

Good first Novel!
I really enjoyed the book. I thought the main characters antics were funny especially when she goes out on her mystery shopping assignments. The supporting characters were interesting. Twist to the ending. Very good first novel, with a trace of Elizabeth Berg style of writing. I hope she writes another book soon!