The Housewife Blues

by Warren Adler

Overview

A small town girl from the Midwest is carried away by her "Prince Charming" to the super-charged canyons of modern New York City. Warned by her uptight advertising executive husband to beware of strangers, the newlywed cannot repress her small town upbringing and instinctive innocence. She eventually befriends many of the offbeat and quirky tenants in her apartment building and enters into their complicated and sometimes tragic lives. Her journey of self-discovery from naiveté through disenchantment and eventual wisdom makes for a suspenseful story of a young woman's inner turmoil and how culture shock can impact on deeply held values.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781532982613
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	06/21/2016
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.77(d)

Read an Excerpt

IF SHE hadn’t placed her great-great-grandmother’s spinet in that exact spot along the east wall and hadn’t set aside time to polish it on this particular April day, Jenny might have avoided any confrontation with this bit of unsavory information. First there was Godfrey Richardson letting himself into the main hallway, which was unusual enough, since he was rarely at home during the middle of a weekday morning. She heard him climb the single flight of stairs to the apartment he shared with his wife, Terry, just above hers on the second floor. The Richardsons rarely used the tiny mahogany-paneled elevator, and she heard his ascending footfalls on the steps, not because she was deliberately listening, but probably because his tread was lighter than usual, as if he were walking on the tips of his toes. She realized, of course, that she was conscious of the difference because it was out of the ordinary pattern of sound and activity of the weekday life of their building. In the two months that she and her husband, Larry, had lived there, she had discovered that she was usually the only tenant in residence on most days. A couple of the tenants had maids in for an hour or two a week, but they came and went with barely a ripple. There were five apartments in their converted East Side Manhattan brownstone, and all of the tenants were normally off pursuing their various vocations during the day. As a housewife, Jenny, too, was pursuing her vocation, which she took as seriously as the others in the building took theirs. Godfrey Richardson’s tiptoeing up the stairs, despite a rational dismissal of it as being none of her business, had alerted her to what followed.Looking out of the bay window through the lower branches of the budding sycamore tree that fronted the building, she had noted that a young woman had passed the building twice already, lingered in front of it briefly, looked up toward the Richardsons’ apartment, then proceeded toward Second Avenue. She was now headed toward the building once again, this time coming from the Third Avenue side. Jenny continued to apply polish to the spinet. She had it on her mental schedule to polish the heirloom once a week. This was exactly the way her mother had treated the spinet in their house in Indiana, and one of the conditions of the gift was that it be treated the same way in perpetuity. It had been purchased by her great-great-grandmother, handed down to each generation in turn, and had never left Indiana. So far it had fared quite well in its new Manhattan life, had not warped and had kept its tune, although she rarely played it.

Editorial Reviews

Plucked from the bosom of her Indiana family by a whirlwind marriage to a slick talker from a Manhattan ad agency, Jenny Burns is thrilled to move to New York to become a perfect housewife. Adler ( The War of the Roses ) plants tongue firmly in cheek as he sends his wide-eyed, corn-fed heroine up against the yuppie element. Although Jenny's husband, Larry, is a blustering prig who bawls her out for fraternizing with the neighbors, she soon becomes the midwestern Mother Teresa in their East Side brownstone, doling out meatloaf and oddly modest sexual favors, offering redemption to an impotent art dealer and a suicidal salesman and helping hush up an affair gone awry in the life of a brittle, chic Vanity Fair editor. Larry, meantime, wheels and deals and belittles his wife until her rose-colored vision of him fades. In this breezy, bitingly funny novel, Adler creates an adept lineup of New York types, such as Larry's unshaven, expensively rumpled business partner Vincent, who clash with Jenny's wholesome aura in a string of amusing, though predictable, scenes that build to a gratifying climax. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly