Lorna Mott Comes Home

From the author of the best-selling Le Divorce and Le Mariage, a sly, subversive comedy of contemporary manners, morals, (ex)marriages, and motherhood (past, present, and future)--about an American woman, an art lecturer, in her sixties, leaving her 20-year marriage to her French second husband, returning to her native San Francisco to pick up a life (hardly recognizable) she left behind and the entwining lives of her children and grandchildren, going slightly awry.

Lorna Mott Dumas, small, pretty, high-strung, the epitome of a successful woman--lovely offspring, grandchildren, health, a French husband, a delightful house and an independent career as an admired art lecturer involving travel and public appearances, expensive clothes. She's a woman with an uncomplicated, sociable nature and an intellectual life.

But in an impulsive and planned decision, Lorna has decided to leave her husband, a notorious tombeur (seducer), and his small ancestral village in France, and return to America, much more suited to her temperament than the rectitude of formal starchy France. For Lorna, a beautiful idyll is over, finished, done . . .

In Lorna Mott Comes Home, Diane Johnson brings us into the dreamy, anxiety-filled American world of Lorna Mott Dumas, where much has changed and where she struggles to create a new life to support herself. Into the mix--her ex-husband, and the father of her three grown children (all supportive), and grandchildren with their own troubles (money, divorce, real estate, living on the fringe; a thriving software enterprise; a missing child in the far east; grandchildren--new hostages to fortune; and, one, 15 years old, a golden girl yet always different, diagnosed at a young age with diabetes, and now pregnant and determined to have the child) . . .

In the midst of a large cast, the precarious balance of comedy and tragedy, happiness and anxiety, contentment and striving, generosity and greed, love and sex, Diane Johnson, our Edith Wharton of ex-pat life, comes home to America to deftly, irresistibly portray, with the lightest of touch, the way we live now.