Meeting New People

For Barbara Foerster , the 58-year-old Brooklynite who narrates Lavery’s wry and empathetic latest (after Christmas at the Women’s Hotel), having a best friend is one of the most important things in the world. Another important thing for Barbara, who works at a gourmet food market, is cooking. So it’s a double blow when she prepares a special dinner for her best friend, Susan Montgomery, only for Susan to confront her with a long list of her faults. (Barbara doesn’t share them with the reader, but she explains that “after a certain point, I told her that I got the idea.”) Barbara then sets out to find a replacement friend, someone who is “a champion of her own happiness, and peacefully minded, but who can still have fun being a little bitchy.” It turns out, however, that Barbara has issues in her other relationships—things are rocky with her son, for example, after she said she didn’t want her young granddaughter around her antique furniture. As Barbara contends with her antisocial habits, she realizes she might have to widen her circle, and she attends an Episcopalian church. Barbara is an endlessly companionable narrator, especially in her moments of self-awareness (“divorced women, as a rule, have totally lost whatever interest in behaving reasonably they ever had in the first place”). Thanks to Lavery’s sharp-tongued heroine, this one leaves a mark. (June)