Stay updated with breaking news from Mott comes home. Get real-time updates on events, politics, business, and more. Visit us for reliable news and exclusive interviews.
Book Review - Lorna Mott Comes Home by Diane Johnson bookpage.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bookpage.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
By Heller McAlpin Correspondent Diane Johnson takes on an elusive subject in her latest trenchant transatlantic comedy of manners: Happiness. “Happiness was like one of those floaters in your eye that you can never focus on, intangible and fleeting,” observes her pragmatic heroine, who after 20 years of marriage to a charming but chronically unfaithful Frenchman has decided it’s time to move back to her native San Francisco. With “Lorna Mott Comes Home,” Johnson returns to the same terrain covered in her beloved trio of novels about American expats living in France – “Le Divorce,” “Le Mariage,” and “L’Affaire” – and again plays the contrasts between French and American culture to highlight the strengths and absurdities of each. But the overarching focus this time around is on 60-something Lorna Mott’s determination to set both herself and her struggling grown children on a happier path. ....
Illustration by Joe Ciardiello. “We know a lesser life does not seem lesser to the person who leads one,” wrote the novelist and critic Diane Johnson in 1972. “His life is very real to him; he is not a minor figure in it.” This wise and witty insight appears in The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives, Johnson’s monograph on Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith. The adulterous wife of the celebrated Victorian writer George Meredith, the spirited Mary Ellen is one of many “lesser” figures, all too frequently female, who have been more or less excised from the historical record. Johnson’s masterful biography paints an evocative portrait of a woman with grand intellectual ambitions and thereby dignifies a figure first vilified and then forgotten by most chroniclers of the period. ....
REVIEW: 'Lorna Mott Comes Home,' by Diane Johnson startribune.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from startribune.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.