In her new novel, “Little Monsters,” Adrienne Brodeur takes readers on a stressful march toward a patriarch’s 70th birthday party.
LITTLE MONSTERS, by Adrienne Brodeur
Adrienne Brodeur’s “Little Monsters” is cleverly calculated to push all the buttons for a wide swath of women. Like her 2019 memoir “Wild Game,” which examined the role Brodeur played in her mother’s long affair with a family friend, “Little Monsters” is a tale of dysfunction and buried secrets, set in and around moneyed Cape Cod.
But the time frame of this engaging, neatly plotted novel distinguishes it, serving as the emotional underpinning of the action. “Little Monsters” is set during the precise cultural moment when it seemed that a woman would soon be ensconced in the White House. The action opens in April 2016, when feminists like Abby Gardner, a quietly ambitious artist, had no idea that, by January, there would be a sudden imperative to knit pink hats and march in the streets.
In April, Abby is focused on other important dates coming up in the fall of 2016. In October, the very personal paintings she’s been working on will be in a group exhibit. She’s nervously anticipating an associated interview with an art magazine. And, if all goes well, she’ll be a mother by November.
Abby plans to keep her surprise pregnancy a secret until her father’s 70th birthday party in August; that’s when she’ll give him a painting revealing the news. Adam, a marine biologist, still lives in the funky home where he raised Abby and her older brother Ken after their mother died suddenly. His parenting style combined benign neglect with instruction in the flora and fauna of the Cape, punctuated by disappearances when he went off his bipolar meds and/or fell in love again. He’s not the sort to beat himself up about this — or anything.
Turning 70 doesn’t stop Adam from thinking of himself as dashing, but it does annoy him that he’s being forced to retire. He has a big reveal planned for the party as well: an incredible breakthrough about humpback whales. Adam hasn’t made this discovery yet, but going off his medication has him convinced that it’s within his grasp. As for the election, he’s still pulling for Bernie Sanders.
Over in a waterfront mansion in Chatham, Ken has a secret too. His wife, Jenny, has required him to get therapy, for reasons the reader immediately knows are creepy. He resists the efforts of the shrink to get him to open up, but attends the sessions because he needs Jenny, particularly for his next move: running as a Republican in the “palest blue congressional district” in Massachusetts.
Ken has had money ever since he married Jenny, who was Abby’s best friend at the Rhode Island School of Design, but as the novel begins he’s just closed on a real estate deal that will make him filthy rich in his own right. A moderate Republican who believes in climate change, particularly as it pertains to the erosion of his own waterfront, Ken has not yet donned a MAGA hat. (But he isn’t ruling it out.)
Jenny, a former free spirit who now views hostessing as her “superpower” and wonders how one glass of wine so often turns into a whole bottle, is planning Adam’s birthday party. Brodeur builds the tension toward that evening in August, setting up the drama just as efficiently as Jenny sets a dinner table for however many people Ken wants to impress.
One of Brodeur’s best dramatic devices is a Boston cop named Steph who spends the summer on the Cape poking into the lives of Adam, Ken and Abby. Through her eyes, we see the Gardners — each exceptional by societal standards, but damaged. Steph’s wife, Toni, a tarot card reading astrologer, warns her to proceed with caution: “Wounded people wound.” She isn’t wrong, although as a supporting character, Toni is a little too on-the-nose.
As I raced happily through the pages, I wondered how the book would work without Brodeur’s highly specific framing. The election backdrop comes to seem like another character and is the reason “Little Monsters” is so alluring, with its sense of looming familial implosion within a cultural implosion. Brodeur infuses the book with the simmering anger that would grow into great rage after the election. Surely the women in this novel will look back on its events through a sharper lens in 2017. Adam’s flirtations with baristas definitely won’t play well in the #MeToo era.
Did I feel catered to by “Little Monsters?” Somewhat. Its very title it reminded me how minor monstrous acts — particularly abuses of power — enable what we refer to in movies and television as the Big Bad. Brodeur is very deliberately examining a small family horror story within a larger political context. Maybe in taking us back to an age of relative innocence, optimism and complacency, she’s taunting her readers a little. Or maybe she’s giving us a pep talk.
Mary Pols is a Maine-based writer and editor. She is the author of a memoir, “Accidentally on Purpose.”
LITTLE MONSTERS | By Adrienne Brodeur | 320 pp. | Avid Reader Press | $28
June 24, 2023 at 04:00PM
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Book Review: “Little Monsters,” by Adrienne Brodeur - The New York Times
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