A DREAM LIFE

Alice Armstrong, an American wife and mother transplanted to Australia in 1971, is unnerved by the responsibilities of running her grand new home.

Her husband, Teddy, pleased by the promotion he gets with his bank’s overseas posting, jokingly dubs the mansion they’ve rented in Sydney “Chateau Deeds,” name-checking the pretentious nouveau-riche Australians who built it. Her daughters, 4 and 6, run shrieking gleefully through the vast rooms. But Alice feels she’s living in “a dream life, where nothing could matter and nothing would last, a hiatus from reality.” Reality intrudes when she realizes she can’t do all the household work on her own. A comedy of employment errors ensues, limned with Messud’s characteristic tart, cogently detailed realism. It begins with an unwed mother who brings her infant, cleans haphazardly for half a day, and never comes back. Other maladroit hires include a bossy Russian caterer for the couple’s numerous parties; a salty live-in housekeeper who turns out to be wanted for credit card fraud and passing bad checks; and the driver of the children's school carpool, whose inappropriate attentions to the girls stop barely short of molestation. Alice also has a hard time with the opinionated gardener left behind by the owners; like all the Australian help, he barely conceals his opinion that his putative boss is hopelessly clueless. Teddy, rarely home, can’t understand why she can’t manage better, and Alice can’t understand what she’s doing in this strange place: “It was as if she had awakened after a drugged sleep to unfamiliar surroundings, as if some irretrievable portion of her life had been stolen from her.” This might be sad if readers were encouraged to feel any empathy for Alice, but Messud takes a cool, detached tone, emphasizing the humor of her dilemmas. The ending suggests that Alice is finally taking some control of her life, reinforcing the overall impression that the stakes aren’t very high here.

Messud’s eye for class distinctions and gender expectation is as sharp as ever in this enjoyable minor effort.