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Meet the Plumb Family…We Dare You
On a midsummer evening somewhere on Long Island, Leo Plumb—a high-profile executive with a crumbling marriage and a towering ego, skidding headlong into middle age—sneaks out of a wedding reception to flirt with Matilda, a young catering waitress. He convinces her to join him on a drunken joyride, which ends in a horrific accident just blocks away from the reception. To silence Matilda and quell any publicity surrounding the accident, Leo’s mother dips into the Nest—the trust fund set up for Leo and his three siblings. Arranged so they wouldn’t have to worry about money in their midlife years, over the decades it has unexpectedly ballooned from a tidy sum to an astronomical windfall. Thus Leo’s accident sets in motion a chain of events that alters the lives and destinies of each of the four Plumb siblings.
In her debut novel, The Nest, author Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney introduces us to the WASPy, New York Plumb family in all of their complicated glory. In addition to the supremely self-centered Leo, there’s his brother Jack, a gay antiques dealer who has made some bad financial decisions; their sister Bea, a once-promising writer who was never able to follow up on her successful first book; and youngest sibling Melody, a suburban mom whose life and anxieties center around her twin daughters, who are growing up and becoming individuals in their own right. The distant, tantalizing promise of the Nest aside, there doesn’t seem to be much that unites the Plumbs, aside from their distant, possibly alcoholic mother, Francie—and the money woes that plague each of them.
As we learn more about each Plumb sibling (and others in the orbit of Planet Plumb), Sweeney gradually lets us into a rarified world of wealth and squandered promise. For reasons as unique as they are, each sibling desperately needs the money their share of the Nest can provide. But now—after Leo’s payout, rehab stint, and costly divorce from the arctic Victoria—the trust fund has dwindled. But the Plumbs’ urgent desire isn’t just for money—it’s a desire for more. More security, more connection—things which, each sibling comes to realize, aren’t just synonyms for money.
Reading The Nest, I was reminded more than once of E.M. Forster’s Howards End. Though present-day New York City doesn’t have the same social customs and moral codes of conduct as Forster’s Edwardian England, each character in The Nest is in a similar state of flux, moving toward an unknown destination, and struggling to connect with themselves, each other, and the world. In Forster’s novel, the characters’ lives revolve around the idea of home and what it means or doesn’t mean. In Sweeney’s novel, the characters’ lives revolve around the promise of the Nest, everything it is and isn’t. The same philosophical forces are at work in both novels, and Sweeney’s knack for drawing us into the delicate web she spins—and (much harder) entertaining us in the process—are tribute to her talents as a storyteller.
But The Nest is in no way an oppressive or overly seriously read. It is, in fact, quite funny (the great Amy Poehler provides a blurb). Sweeney isn’t afraid to show us the Plumbs warts and all, and some of those warts are pretty comical; part of The Nest‘s pleasures is that it’s incisive, darkly humorous, and often downright delicious. It’s about a family as crazy and funny and savage and loving as yours or mine. As we feel the gentle pull of fate tugging at each of the Plumb siblings, Sweeney exposes both the majesty and the error of their ways. Their respective journeys may be choppy (whose journey isn’t?), but every jolt provides an opportunity to wake up just a little bit, to maybe make a different choice; in short, to learn. And they are struggling for the same thing the characters in Howards End are: in the words of Forster, to “only connect.”
The Nest hits shelves March 22, and is available for pre-order now.