THE PESSIMISTS

Ball’s mixture of satire and domestic drama turns contemporary suburban life into a frightening dystopia of “material leisure and emotional poverty.”

The satiric element centers around the Petra School, a private “temple of education” in upscale Somerset, Connecticut. Headmistress Agnes seems warm and charismatic if a bit eccentric at first, but her dictatorial creepiness becomes apparent, both in the increasingly strident school bulletins she sends—linking dairy and dyslexia, warning against (pre-Covid era) vaccinations, banning any mention of Jewish holidays—and as she exerts personal control over both students and parents. Starting on New Year’s Eve 2013, Ball follows several of those parents and potential parents as three marriages begin to tailspin into crisis. Current Petra parents Virginia and Tripp are keeping huge secrets from each other: Novelist Virginia has cancer, while financially strapped Tripp has built a survivalist arsenal in the basement. Virginia’s old friend Rachel and her Swedish architect husband, Gunter, have recently arrived from Manhattan and enrolled their kids at Petra. Initially Rachel, though Jewish, is so desperate to fit in that she ignores hints of Agnes’ antisemitism, but Gunter is dismissive of Petra (and suburbia and America in general). Then Agnes begins to woo him. Margo, a compulsive cleaner and stay-at-home mother of three sons, has never recovered emotionally from the death of an infant daughter. Now a fanatic follower of Agnes’ Wednesday evening meditation sessions, Margo wants to switch her boys from public school to Petra despite objections from the kids and her overworked husband, Richard, a devoted father, pothead, and online porn addict. Once readers are drawn into these stories, Ball leaps into a broad rhetorical section, describing from a third-person plural viewpoint all the ways suburban men and women, as well as their children, are miserable. Certainly the kids Ball introduces are unhappy. Virginia and Tripp’s daughter is burdened by her parents’ secrets. Petra turns Rachel’s 6-year-old son into an outcast. Richard and Margo’s three sons stand by helplessly watching their parents’ mental health deteriorate.

Despite Ball’s mordant humor, the pain here feels all too real.