Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #411317 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Frederica Hatch—the articulate, curious, and naïve narrator of Lipman's eighth novel—proves the perfect vehicle for this satiric yet compassionate family portrait. It's 1976, and psych professors David and Aviva Hatch are honest with their daughter to the point of anatomically correcting Frederica's Barbie dolls. In all their years as a dorm family at a small women's college outside Boston, though, no one mentioned Laura Lee French, David's first wife (and distant cousin). Frederica, now 15 and ready for rebellion, delights in Laura's arrival on campus as a new dorm mother; David and Aviva look on nervously as the two become fast friends. In contrast with Frederica's right-thinking, '60s radical parents, Laura Lee becomes the delicious embodiment of all the moral and psychological complexities of a flawed world beyond campus. Meanwhile, campus itself looks very little like an ivory tower as major scandal brews amid petty gossip. As in previous novels, Lipman addresses sensitive issues (anti-Semitism, adultery, dementia) with delicacy and acerbity. She also nails the shifts and moods of an angry teenager, a grandmother in denial, a philanderer in hiding and a campus in shock. By the end, a smart young girl learns compassion for a world that can be grotesquely, hilariously, disturbingly unfair. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Elinor Lipman is a far more serious novelist than she pretends to be or is allowed to be by reviewers. (I learned a long time ago that to be taken seriously you need to cut back on the funny lines. I once all but won the Booker Prize for a novel from which, on Kingsley Amis's advice, I had removed anything remotely mirthful. Alas, it was still "all but," so I reverted to my old ways.) Lipman, declining to learn this worldly wisdom, goes on making jokes and therefore tends to get described with adjectives that are good for sales but bad for literary reputations: "oddball," "hilarious," "over-the-top," "quirky," "beguiling" or, worst of all, "summer reading." The prose slips down too easily and pleasantly to allow her to rise into the literary top division, where the adjectives become "piercing," "important," "profound," "significant," "lyrical," "innovative" and so on. Dull, in fact.

But up there at the top is where this enchanting, infinitely witty yet serious, exceptionally intelligent, wholly original and Austen-like stylist belongs. Delicately, she travels the line where reality and fiction meet. Reality being more oddball, quirky and chaotic than fiction can ever be, Lipman inures us to the truth about the way we live by making it up as she goes along, cracking jokes and pretending it's all fiction.

This is Lipman's campus novel. (She wanders in and out of genres. The Dearly Departed was a mystery featuring dead bodies and policemen -- or "Summer reading at its best," as the Atlantic Monthly damned it. The Pursuit of Alice Thrift was her doctors-and-nurses novel, elegant and baneful.) Being a Lipman creation, the heroine of My Latest Grievance is no conventional academic but the precocious 16-year-old Frederica, child of two kindly, solemn professors, PC before their time. (The novel is set in the '70s.) Her father is the union grievance chairperson; her mother lectures on social stratification, murder and penology. Frederica's father turns out to have had a first wife, the egregious Laura Lee. Claiming stepmotherly status, Laura Lee appears out of nowhere to become a campus house mother, seduce the dean, nearly get the parson excommunicated, drive drunk and claim pregnancy, leaving Frederica to deal with the fall-out. Lipman takes this kind of thing for granted. So do I. Real life is fuller of outrage than fiction ever is.

See Frederica now, eating in the college canteen. Because her highly developed community spirit suggests that she always choose a seat next to the lonely and neglected, she sits next to the ostracized Laura Lee. Frederica's mother joins them: "My mother put her tray down next to mine. Her plate held only the evening's carrots, baked potato, and raw cauliflower florets from the salad bar. She looked her dowdiest, her gray hair bushing out from two mismatched barrettes of mine, her reading glasses dangling over a faded brown turtleneck, torn along one shoulder seam."

" 'Are you a vegetarian?' asked Laura Lee."

Laura Lee's subtext: Trust the ex-husband to choose a non-meat-eater for a second wife. And on the novel blithely goes. Lipman would not dream of belaboring a point, underlining a joke for our benefit. She side-swipes them, leaving a gap between her sentences, a jump in reasoning that both diverts and requires attention and leaves you laughing aloud.

Frederica is aggrieved. She has reason to be: She had no childhood; she has no home other than the college dorm; her diet since infancy has been the college canteen. "I wanted to be cool," she thinks. "I wanted my father to drive a car and wear a suit to work. I wanted my mother to read Vogue, color and straighten her gray hair, wear high heels, cut the crusts off sandwiches. I knew from television that families were supposed to live in houses, to sleep uninterrupted by fire drills or homesick freshmen, and eat by themselves in dining rooms that didn't seat a thousand." No such luck.

Frederica's fate is to end up in the college where she began, as vice chancellor in charge of administration of all things financial. Eventually, she creates the Laura Lee French prize, to be awarded to the student who most emulates that respected creature, now deceased. "When the winner is announced -- always a famously kooky but popular pain in the ass -- the crowd goes wild." It does not matter if I've told you how the book ends; the delights of the journey are everything. Elinor Lipman seems to find difficulty in taking herself seriously, but I think this is superstition -- the better to turn away the wrath of the Gods of Literature, who might strike her down in envy if she catches their eye.

Reviewed by Fay Weldon
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Elinor Lipman's eighth novel (after The Pursuit of Alice Thrift, **** Sept/Oct 2003) exhibits her trademark social satire, facility with dialogue, and humor. Like her other novels, it addresses themes close to the heart: the bonds between parents and children and between fiction and reality. Covering a few decades, the novel offers a smart, funny protagonist and outlandish, if highly realistic, situations. Yet while the Seattle Times called the novel Lipman's "best work so far" and the Washington Post couldn't praise the author enough, the Chicago Tribune felt that Lipman's wit masked genuine emotion. Only USA Today thought the novel descended into poorly plotted melodrama. The general consensus, however, is that My Latest Grievance is worth a reader's every second.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Lipman humor at its best...
As someone who has read ALL of Elinor Lipman books, let me just tell the "first timers" out there that you are in for a treat. All of Lipman's books are literary gems, and My Latest Grievance is no exception. Frederica Hatch and her politically correct "before it was cool" parents will delight and entertain even the most jaded readers- perhaps those most of all. Lipman has a real knack for capturing the idiosyncrasies of academia, and this provides limitless opportunities for brilliant satire.

The complications surrounding the Professors Hatch, an ex-wife, and a precocious daughter are a pleasure to read.

Engrossing and generous
I thought this novel was excellent, keeping me up way too late on several nights that I really shouldn't have stayed up! The story unfolded in a believable way and the characters reminded me of people I know and universities where I lived and studied. Lipman's quick mind shows itself in the things she DOESN'T spell out. In this respect, the dialogue is particularly entertaining. Really wonderful - I hope you like it, too!

A diamond in the rough-not Elinor Lipman at her best-but close to it
As a devoted fan of the divine Ms. Elinor Lipman I was a little disappointed with this novel-at first. In the early chapters, which are all background and setting information I thought there was no plot. And in fact, through much of the book, I still thought there was no plot. But then I remembered what I liked about Elinor Lipman.

She tells stories. Real stories like someone would tell to a friend about this crazy/amazing/totally ordinary thing that happened in their life. My first read of hers was Isabel's Bed-which basically has no plot. It's a story-and stories don't need a real plot. They just tell what happens.

So she takes these stories and twists them with an often hilarious narrative point of view. This author does not deserve to be classified as a beach read-she writes real novels. Why is it that ever enjoyable book is stigmatized in some way? I love what Ms. Lipman writes-and no matter what others think I think she deserves awards for it.

The title of the book is not what it seems. Grievance in this setting means a complaint to a union about contractual obligations. In 1978 Frederica Hatch is the 16 year old daughter of two union rabble rising professors-and she's lived her whole life as the campus darling in a dorm apartment. Then, along comes Laura Lee, her father's first, dancing non union, wife-and everything gets stirred up.

This book is a little like a diamond in the rough-it needs some polishing. There are too many chapters that don't advance the story and too many assumptions on behalf of the narrator, some parts are even boring. But other than that this is what Lipman does best-a first person narrative of something that happened to them-told as it would be to a friend.

Four point five stars.