THE MEANS

You, too, can have a beach house in the Hamptons...sort of.

"I used to think aliveness was a binary: a person was either alive or dead. But now I know that aliveness is more like something on a continuum, like the pain scale. And I want to be more alive. I want to be as alive as possible. My beach house would help me do that." Shelly Means, nonworking mother of two, wife of a struggling voice-over narrator, denizen of a part of Manhattan she calls the "discount caftan and incense district," is obsessed. Lucky for her, the woman who is providing online cognitive behavior therapy for her anger issues (Shelly threw her water bottle at the school board president) is also a real estate broker and knows just the tick-infested, nonwaterfront piece of land in a part of the Hamptons she and George can afford, once they sell their raccoon-infested lake house. And if they construct the house out of used shipping containers, give up all but the most basic amenities, and take out a loan, they may even be able to build on it. With its deadpan absurdity, pithy prose, and moral je ne sais quoi, Fusselman's latest will appeal to fans of Marcy Dermansky. With its sapient talking dog, readers of Susan Coll. And with its satire of the particular hypocrisy of the Hamptons, including homeowners associations, graft, and garbage and recycling practices, Maria Semple. Running jokes abound, involving, among other things, raccoons, Japanese toilets, nutrition bars called Generosity, Vulnerability, and Caring, and seltzer called Loving. We may be entering a golden age of the comic novel, surely one of the best possible outcomes of this desperate moment in history. Take it from Shelly's teenage son: “If you need money, you should write fiction. That’s what Roberto Bolaño did after he had a family and wanted to make money: he turned to fiction.”

A trenchant comedy of class and the way we live now.