Old money, environmental activism and large waterfowl collide in
the suburbs of Boston.Wild geese have descended on Eden Rock
Country Club, and they've excited a discordant array of reactions.
The club manager wants them gone, dead or alive. The club chef
wants them fat and juicy in time for a big awards banquet. The
groundskeeper wants to protect them from poisonous herbicides; he's
adopted a gosling for a pet. And one of the club's members has
descended into an existential funk after accidentally killing one
of the birds with a golf ball. Meanwhile, the Eden Rock social
scene is just recovering from a broken engagement between two young
members, Nina Rundlett and Eliot Farnsworth. Their breakup was
engineered by Arietta Wingate, keeper of "the book": a record of
the club's sexual history, secretly maintained since Eden Rock's
inception and passed down through the generations from one club
matriarch to her carefully chosen apprentice. Arietta knows who the
real fathers are, and it's her job to prevent intra-club marriages
between partners unaware of their consanguinity. These two
plotlines make very odd bedfellows. The plague of geese could have
triggered a slapstick romp or a sharp satire. It could have been a
black comedy of manners. But it's neither, and lacks both fizz and
bite. Nor does Hart create some other satisfying whole from these
disparate pieces. The large cast of characters adds diversity
without adding interest. Hart narrates in the third person, but she
allows individual voices to color each chapter's tone, a technique
that would have been more successful if her characters weren't
uniformly one-dimensional. Club manager Gerard has no existence
beyond Eden Rock; chef Vita thinks of nothing but foie gras and
creme fra"che; activist Phoebe seldom spares a thought for anything
she can't protest. They may not be unrealistic - people can, of
course, be overworked, food-obsessed and shrilly judgmental - but
they certainly are boring.An unfocused, underdeveloped, unexciting
debut. (Kirkus Reviews)
It's the 4th of July weekend and Charles Lambert is about to tee
off and, he hopes, shake the doldrums that have been dogging him
all year. But alas, his errant shot knocks out one of the geese
that have taken up residence on the grounds, and sets in motion a
series of events that will, by Labor Day, leave the club members
and staff changed forever. Charles is sent into a tailspin of a
midlife crisis, his wife Madeline is soon abandoned by her tennis
'friends' who don't want to deal with her husband's oddities, and
their militantly vegan daughter Phoebe returns from college
hell-bent on changing the world, one country club at a time. Then
there's Gerard, the uptight club manager trying to rein in both the
geese and his unruly membership, and finally there's Vita, the club
chef, who regards every plate of food like a work of art.
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