A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein

From the Publisher

Pete Dizinoff has spent years working toward a life that would be, by all measures, deemed successful. A skilled internist, he's built a thriving practice in suburban New Jersey. He has a devoted wife, a network of close friends, and an impressive house, and most important, he has a son, Alec, on whom he's pinned all his hopes. Pete has afforded Alec every opportunity, bailed him out of close calls with the law, and even ensured his acceptance into a good college.

But Pete never counted on the wild card: Laura, his best friend's daughter...ten years older than Alec, irresistibly beautiful, with a past so shocking that it's never spoken of. When Laura sets her sights on Alec, Pete sees his plans for his son not just unraveling but being destroyed completely. Believing he has only the best of intentions, he sets out to derail this romance and rescue his son. He could never have foreseen how his whole world would shatter in the process.

Lauren Grodstein delivers a riveting story in the tradition of The Ice Storm, American Beauty, and Little Children, charting a father's fall from grace as he struggles to save his family, his reputation, and himself.

The Washington Post - Ron Charles

It's about a devoted dad whose parental concerns fester into a toxin that eventually poisons his life. There's nothing polemic or didactic about Grodstein's story, but she's written such an incisive diagnosis of aspirational America that someone should hand out copies at Little League games and ballet recitals…What Grodstein captures so strikingly is the anxiety of a father's love, that aching affection that can flip in a moment of panicked disappointment to full-blown disgust…Horrifyingly plausible and deeply poignant, A Friend of the Family will leave you shaken and chastened—and grateful for the warning.

Publishers Weekly

In her wonderful second novel, Grodstein (Reproduction Is the Flaw of Love) traces a suburban crisis and gives especially perceptive attention to the father-son bond. Pete Dizinoff has it pretty good-an internist with a successful practice, loving wife, nice house in a safe New Jersey suburb and his best friend living close by-but there's some nasty muck beneath the surface. Some years back, Laura, the daughter of Pete's best friend, Joe, was suspected of murdering her baby upon birth. Now in her early 30s, Laura's returned to town after several years of leisurely work and travel and is seducing Pete's college dropout son, Alec, who is also back in town, pursuing the life of a painter in his parents' garage. Laura does not fit into Pete's idea of what's best for his son, but when Pete intervenes, things spin wildly out of control. Add to this a malpractice case, and Pete senses his life is falling apart. An astute dissector of male aspiration, Grodstein brings great insight into a father's protective urge for his son in this gripping portrait of an American family in crisis. (Nov.)

Kirkus Reviews

The road to hell is paved with a father's good intentions. Grodstein (Reproduction is the Flaw of Love, 2004, etc.) pushes some powerful emotional buttons in this tale of male mid-life angst, atavism and breakdown. Narrator Peter Dizinoff, a successful, occasionally dictatorial Jewish internist, has made good in exactly the way the American Dream promised his hard-working parents in Yonkers. He has a lovely home in New Jersey, a caring wife who has survived breast cancer, a thriving medical practice, good friends and a beloved son. Peter is proud of Alec and wants the best for his son, so he's understandably disappointed when Alec turns rebellious, drops out of college and gets involved with the troubled daughter of Peter's best friend Joe Stern. At 17, Laura Stern gave birth to a premature baby and abandoned it in a dumpster with a crushed skull. Acquitted of deliberate murder, she spent two years in a psychiatric facility and more than a decade away from home. Returning for a visit in 2006, this "polished, flirtatious" 31-year-old attracts the fascinated attention of considerably younger Alec. The novel doesn't hurry to reveal how Peter comes, some time after this encounter, to be living alone above the garage of his house, rejected by his wife, Alec and Joe, forced to start a new medical practice in a poorer part of town. The twisting, occasionally confusing retrospective storyline is only the most notable of the author's flaws in construction; direction and plotting are similarly problematic, especially the conclusion, with its pile-up of not quite plausible failures. Nonetheless, Grodstein's wry insights, her fully imagined social panorama and her vision of a middle-class man at thecrossroads testify to her considerable skill. Ambitious, often impressive but structurally flawed work.

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