A Perfect Arrangement
By Suzanne Berne
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 301 pages, $23.95
Female writers tend to be the miniaturists of fiction. As opposed to novelists like Don DeLillo, who prefers a broad canvas of society, or Philip Roth, who views personal relationships through the prism of sexual longing, prize winners such as Alice McDermott, Carol Shields and Alice Munro find universal truths in the smallness of individual lives.
This is a tricky proposition, and Suzanne Berne pulled it off with controlled skill in her first novel, “A Crime in the Neighborhood,” which won Britain’s Orange Prize.
“A Crime in the Neighborhood” deals with the sexual molestation and murder of a 12-year-old boy in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in the 1970s, a story told through the eyes of a neighbor girl who was 10 at the time. But the book is really about the break-up of the girl’s parents’ marriage. The two events play off each other to underscore some of the modern dangers of growing up.
In her new novel, “A Perfect Arrangement,” Berne paints a similarly grim picture of the contemporary American family. Mirella and Howard Cook-Goldman–she is a divorce lawyer, he is an architect–live in a quaint township near Boston. As the story opens, it is a year after the widely publicized Boston court battle between a grieving couple and the nanny accused of shaking their toddler to death. With understandable anxiety, the couple is searching for someone new to care for their young children, Pearl and Jacob.
The Cook-Goldman household is in sad shape. Basic tasks such as doing laundry and putting meals on the table are being neglected, Jacob has cognitive or emotional problems that are being ignored, and the marriage is fraying under the strain.
Thus, at the first sight of Randi Gill, a young nanny with a vague background but a friendly face, Howard and Mirella waste no time signing her up. Her devotion seems unbounded, and at first it looks like a perfect arrangement.
Describing Randi’s work habits to her law partner, Mirella raves about the young woman’s spinach quiche, her rapport with Jacob and her insistence on mothering not just the kids but also the adults in the household.
A “‘domestic missionary,'” her partner marvels, but whether the term is being applied with admiration or sarcasm is hard to tell.
From the beginning, it’s clear there’s something odd about the whole deal. Mirella’s mother has the good sense to question Randi’s excessive bonding with the household, wondering how it could be a good thing for the long term. But for Howard and Mirella, their neediness trumps any sense of perspective about the new caregiver. They blithely buy her story about how her parents were killed, rationalizing that, under such circumstances, it’s good that they can give her a place to call home.
That’s not the only rationalizing they do. Early on it becomes clear that Howard and Mirella are too self-involved for their own good or that of their children. And each of them is preoccupied with a secret: Mirella has discovered she’s pregnant again and doesn’t know how to tell Howard. Howard, meanwhile, is trying to tamp down an extramarital fling that has come back to haunt him.
At the same time, Randi is an emotionally immature woman with a dysfunctional background who’s now caught up in idealized versions of family life. She has faked her past and obscured her employment history. From the start, the question is not whether Randi’s presence will damage the family further, but rather how it will happen.
Will she hurt one of the children? Will she seduce Howard? Will she poison Mirella’s tea? Berne throws out clues, but maybe they’re only decoys.
“A Perfect Arrangement” is told through the perspective of all three main characters. Their observations about themselves and each other overlap to create a composite, and this structure is where Berne gets herself into trouble.
Writers are always advised to provide the telling detail. But here there seems no detail too small to be observed: Pearl has “faintly slanted brown eyes,” Randi ample breasts, Howard’s office assistant pierced eyebrows. Likewise, the characters spend inordinate amounts of time assessing their own and each other’s strengths and inadequacies. Howard sits in his home office thinking about his “modern Valkyrie” of a wife rather than doing any work. Mirella never sits still, at least as far as we can see, and her mind is similarly working overtime, analyzing her husband and making promises that she will spend more time with her children. With no life of her own, Randi has hours to snoop around the house and assess its occupants.
Berne seems to be bent on fleshing out the characters with all their warts in order to reveal the dismal world of two-career couples with children. This warts-and-all approach also makes everyone culpable concerning whatever harm befalls the kids.
There are two problems with her approach: First, piling on so much information tends to suffocate rather than illuminate, particularly when you’re dealing with people as unsympathetic as Howard and Mirella. Second, because Berne plays it straight rather than going for satire, she lays it on too thick to serve her story. Randi is too obsessive, Howard too passive and Mirella too frantic. Mirella in particular is a parody of the woman trying to juggle family and work. Incompetent though some lawyers may be, having the wherewithal to earn a law degree and start a successful practice suggests someone who should be able to handle the little chores with some savvy. Yet Mirella seems dumbstruck by matters as trivial as loading the laundry.
“A Perfect Arrangement” wants to raise some serious issues about the two-career family, and at some level it succeeds. As a critique of self-centered yuppie parenthood, it will appeal to readers disgusted with the idea that you can have it all–and babies too.
Falling short of satire, however, the book suffers from its exaggeration and lack of subtlety. Especially in affluent, professional families, parental neglect is more complicated than a messy house, hastily prepared meals or forgetting to do a volunteer assignment at your child’s school. The symptoms are more insidious, and the solution far more complicated, than this novel reveals.
