2 Novels Explore The Big Romantic Bargains We Strike In The Name Of Love

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. For anyone who's ever looked around at a holiday dinner table and asked themselves, who are these people and why am I spending time with them, our book critic Maureen Corrigan recommends two new semi-comic novels about family.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: You fall in love with a person, but you get a package deal. That's one of the big messages of two new novels that ruminate on love and family, particularly the family that's thrust upon you when you happen to mate with one of their kith or kin. The heroine of Katherine Heiny's buoyant new novel, "Early Morning Riser," is a young second-grade teacher named Jane who lives in Boyne City, Mich. On the very first page of the novel, Jane locks herself out of her house, calls a locksmith and winds up spending the night and eventually her life with him. But the relationship is not without complications.

That hunky locksmith's name is Duncan, and Jane thinks he looked like the Brawny paper towel man. But Duncan turns out to have bedded most of the available women in Boyne City. He's still friendly with a lot of them, including his ex-wife, Aggie, who's remarried to an insurance guy with the personality of a houseplant. Duncan also works as a furniture restorer, and he employs a helper named Jimmy Jellico, who people in town describe as slow learning.

By the middle of this novel, Jimmy is permanently installed in Jane and Duncan's spare bedroom. And Aggie and her houseplant husband are regulars for dinner parties. How did a fling calcify into an alternative family, one that Jane is pretty sure she wouldn't have consciously chosen? Heiny writes in a simple, droll style about ordinary people who are often being less than their best selves. Here, for instance, is Jane's take on the ordeal of parent-teacher conferences that she's required to hold for an entire school day each semester.

(Reading) All parents want to hear good things about their children, but sometimes you had to say bad things. If you said the bad things too subtly, the parents didn't believe you. If you said the bad things too baldly, the parents got upset. Actually, they often didn't believe you anyway. And then they got upset, too. It was like having an intervention for an alcoholic every 20 minutes for an entire working day.

In addition to "Early Morning Riser," Katherine Heiny has just written a foreword to a new edition of Laurie Colwin's 1978 classic "Happy All The Time." And as a quick aside, I'll share the great news that all 10 of Laurie Colwin's books are being reissued this year. Both Colwin and Hynie are routinely, and I think rightly, described as literary descendants of Jane Austen, sharing Austen's essentially comic world view.

The humor in award-winning writer Joan Silber's new novel called "Secrets Of Happiness" is more subdued. It's rueful, rather than charming. "Secrets Of Happiness" opens with a middle-aged gay lawyer named Ethan recalling his childhood in Manhattan and how his father, who was in what he called the rag trade, often traveled on business trips to Asia. Fast-forward to the day when Ethan, along with his mother and sister, discovered that dad has a second family. It turns out that the hostess in the Thai restaurant in Queens they all like to go to for special dinners is a woman Ethan's dad brought over from Thailand years ago. And together, they've had two sons who are now teenagers.

You'd expect that bombshell would send Ethan's family reeling, and it sort of does. His mother, for instance, goes off for a year to Thailand herself to teach English and backpack. But something else happens in this expansive and elegantly crafted novel. Silber begins handing the story off chapter by chapter to other narrators. Among them, Ethan's newly discovered half-brothers, the ex-girlfriend of one of those half brothers, and Ethan's fickle present lover's former lover. It's not like everyone knows each other, but they're connected in some cosmic way, almost like a horizontal extended family tree that can only be observed from space. And they all have such smart things to say about love, whether it's Ethan rueing the blindness of romance or, as he puts it, the sunny opacity that love can induce. Or this question from a young acquaintance of his named Nadia. Nadia asks, how do people make these colossal bargains about what they decide to put up with?

The characters in both Silber's and Heiny's novels are reckoning with the outcome of those colossal romantic bargains, not only about what they decided to put up with, but also who all those other people, family and friends, bound to the beloved, inextricably part of the package deal.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "Early Morning Riser" by Katherine Heiny and "Secrets Of Happiness" by Joan Silber. If you'd like to catch up on FRESH AIR interviews you missed, like this week's interview with Stephen Colbert or our celebration of the 50th anniversary of NPR and All Things Considered with Bill Siemering, who created All Things Considered, and Susan Stamberg, who hosted it from 1972 to '86, check out our podcast. You'll find lots of FRESH AIR interviews.

Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Ann Marie Baldonado, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelley and Kayla Lattimore. Our associate producer of digital media is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Therese Madden directed today's show. I'm Terry Gross. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.