HOT AIR

A single mom and her 8-year-old daughter spend a weekend with the super-rich.

When Joannie’s neighbor Johnny asks her out, and she says she doesn’t have a babysitter, he tells her to bring Lucy to watch movies with his son, Tyson, in the basement. “He promised a nice meal, and Joannie loved free dinners. Nothing, of course, could ever happen between them because of their names. Joannie and Johnny.” Anyone who’s already read Dermansky will recognize these deadpan sentences. And, of course, something is going to happen on the very next page, actually—a billionaire couple celebrating their anniversary with a hot air balloon ride crash-lands in Johnny’s swimming pool, the wife screaming “I will kill you, if we don’t die!” Meet Jonathan and Julia Foster, a famous tech CEO and his philanthropist wife. Soon, Joannie and Julia are drinking fancy wine out of the bottle by the side of the pool and Johnny is inviting everyone for a sleepover. And the surprises just keep coming, many of them created simply by switching points of view, which Dermansky does every few pages, including not just these four but also Joannie’s daughter, Lucy, and the Fosters’ personal assistant, Vivian, an erstwhile Vietnamese orphan and 24-year-old aspiring writer. Vivian is a genius character, but honestly, they all are, and their inner monologues prove once again that Dermansky knows just how awful people really are inside, and can make it very, very funny. You might find yourself trying to put this book down so it won’t be over too soon. And when it is, you might start it all over again to see how the heck she did it. Has any writer made so much happen in just over 200 pages?

A new Dermansky novel is like a holiday declared out of the blue.