Alan Opts Out

An advertising executive’s exasperation with the business world strains his marriage in this pitch-perfect satire from Maum (Touch). Fifty-something Alan Anderson toils ceaselessly on his firm’s pitch for a pro-milk campaign, hoping to garner his 10th industry excellence award and quell his nagging fear that “something dark” is approaching. He also plans to reinvigorate his stagnant marriage to Vivian, his wife of almost 20 years, by giving her the backyard swimming pool she longs for at their opulent home in Greenwich, Conn. Meanwhile, Vivian treads water raising their two daughters, 15 and 12, and obsesses over becoming one of their seaside neighborhood’s Queen Annes, an elite group of wives chosen by chic Whitby, their “bully, princess, icon.” After Alan’s bid for the milk campaign curdles, he retreats to his daughters’ backyard playhouse, where he finds himself in a “poetic mood.” He decides to drop out of the rat race and live there, unplugged from the family’s smarthome, leaving Vivian unmoored and slipping deeper into Whitby’s orbit. Packed with Maum’s gimlet-eyed observations on the “futile” and “absurd” nature of Alan’s work and Vivian’s indefatigable social aspirations, the novel offers a fierce and funny portrait of late-stage capitalism and its limited supply of happiness. It’s a gem. Agent: Rebecca Gradinger, UTA. (June)