THE WENTWORTHS
Katie Arnoldi
The Overlook Press
Fiction
ISBN: 9781585679997

• Read an Excerpt
• Author Interview –– March 14, 2008

Are you familiar with that cable television show “The Real Housewives of Orange County”? The one that encourages viewers to vicariously celebrate its subjects' fabulously luxurious lifestyles even as they secretly revel in the rich suburbanites' secret problems, crises and failures? Well, Katie Arnoldi's new book is kind of like that. Except without the celebrating part. In THE WENTWORTHS, her second novel following her surprise bestseller CHEMICAL PINK, Arnoldi gleefully skewers the self-absorbed, self-deluded members of one of Los Angeles's foremost families.

Nary a member of the extended Wentworth clan escapes Arnoldi's wickedly funny poison pen. There's big game hunter, compulsive womanizer and closet alcoholic Augustus, the patriarch of the family, and his wife Judith, a woman who will defend her family to the death --- at least to outsiders. One on one, though, Judith is a force to reckon with, as she cleverly and maliciously exploits each of her children's weaknesses to get what she wants (in this case, a set of valuable sugar tongs, whose disappearance precipitates one of the novel's central crises).

Judith's grown children have not fared well under the combination of a dictatorial mother, a distant father and way too much money. Conrad, the eldest, is a lawyer successful at representing some of the most despicable and notorious clients in Los Angeles. He's clearly hung up on his mother, as his string of short-term girlfriends bear a suspicious resemblance to a young Judith. In between girlfriends, Conrad keeps himself busy with a variety of questionable sexual exploits, including some with very young girls.

Becky, the middle child, idolizes her mother, starving herself to maintain the kind of perfect body her mother has always possessed. Distant from her well-meaning but bumbling husband Paul and ultra-critical of her own two troubled children, Becky finds herself turning more and more to sleeping pills to solve her problems.

And then there's Norman, the oddball of the family. The youngest son, whose homosexuality and cross-dressing both mystify and embarrass the family, Norman lives a lonely life in his parents' guest house, longing only to escape from under the oppressive thumb of the Wentworth family name. The philosopher of the family, Norman is the only one who thinks he sees his family for the monstrous people they are: "Norman was a robin's egg, all fragile and baby blue… And there he sat in a room full of egg sucking predators…. Yes, they would like to break his beautiful delicate shell. They would drop him out of his nest and watch him smash on the ground far below then walk away without a second glance."

If only the Wentworths could keep to themselves, they might be able to continue their shared delusion of their own superiority. But when they get inextricably caught up with a couple of outsiders, this powerful clan might just be brought to its knees once and for all.

Arnoldi has a lot of fun deriding her characters' foibles, both the harmless ones and the truly disturbing tendencies. Readers, too, will laugh almost in spite of themselves at the author’s wickedly funny descriptions of the Wentworths' opinions of themselves and others. Broken up into many short chapters, alternating among various characters' viewpoints (some told in first person, others in third person), Arnoldi constructs a remarkably detailed family portrait of sorts in this slim but deadly clever novel.

Granted, this family portrait is certainly not one we'd ever like to see hanging in our living room --- or even in the living room of any of our friends --- but Arnoldi's tragicomic sendup of the Wentworths' decline and fall (and rise again?) is riveting nonetheless. THE WENTWORTHS is the kind of novel that will remind readers of F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous observation that the rich "are different than you and I" and have them thanking their lucky stars that that's so.

    --- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

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