In his second novel (after Wise Men), Stuart Nadler (The Book of Life) focuses on three generations of smart, idiosyncratic women with all the mother/daughter drama that entails. Henrietta Olyphant is the 70-year-old matriarch, a recent widow and former Women's Studies professor who infamously authored the popular soft-porn novel The Inseparables in her 20s. Financial insecurity threatens because she dumped her royalties into her late husband's failed white-tablecloth restaurant. Desperate for a rich advance, she agrees to re-issue the embarrassing novel ("one of America's most famously trashy books") and even go on a book tour as what her publisher calls "some looked-over doyenne of sexual health. A soothsayer of a new collectively libidinous generation."
That generation includes her daughter, Oona, a successful orthopedic surgeon who returns to live with Henrietta while divorcing a stoner, stay-at-home husband. It's no surprise that Oona took a different direction from her indomitable mother, who secretly hoped that Oona would "become a firebrand or an artist, or at least somewhat competent during dinner conversation about, say, Susan Sontag's 'Notes on Camp.' " As mother and daughter strain to adjust to each other, Oona's 15-year-old daughter, Lydia, gets suspended from prep school when her boyfriend virally circulates her topless cellphone photo. Forced to deal with her embarrassment and shame, Lydia is suddenly the mediator between her parents and a confidante of a grandmother who once scoffed at her Sleeping Beauty bed sheets: "Dynastic power, jewel worship, the reanimating capacities of Prince Charming's lips--none of this will help you." Sharply drawn, amusingly observed, Nadler's three generations of women make for a richly entertaining novel. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.