Modern manners

Le Divorce author delivers another hit

The opening scene is perfection. We meet the title heroine of Diane Johnson’s latest novel, Lorna Mott Comes Home, as she rides in the back of a taxi, en route to the train station in Lyon. Lorna, a U.S. woman “of a certain age,” asks the driver to stop so she can observe the aftermath of a mudslide that has unearthed coffins, bursting them open and exposing corpses, bones and “a huge, sticky hillock of treacherous clay” in the village where she has lived with her French husband for 20 years.

The husband is a serial philanderer who most recently has been discovered having an affair with the wife of the local baker. Lorna has finally had enough. She is heading home to San Francisco where she hopes to re-establish herself professionally. “She would prove, to herself if to no one else, that you can make a new life at any age.” The symbolism of the graveyard upheaval does not escape her: “Sometimes the metaphorical significance of a random event startles with its application to your life,” Lorna thinks.

This is Johnson’s 12th novel and 18th book. She is perhaps best known as the author of Le Divorce, which was made into a 2003 film starring Kate Hudson and Naomi Watts. It’s one of her three books to be named a finalist for a U.S. National Book Award. Johnson is also a two-time Pulitzer finalist whose books are often compared to those of Edith Wharton and Henry James.

All of which is to say that a review of the latest entry to this 87-year-old author’s body of work arguably ought to have less to do with deconstructing the plot or gauging the likability of the characters than with heralding the arrival of another of her smart comedies of manners. Her fans will not be disappointed.

Money plays a key role in this novel, set during the financial crisis of the late 2000s. Lorna and her adult children are all struggling to some degree.

“They all, the whole family, badly needed money.”