In this delightful novel from an author who has been favored in so many ways by the muse of comedy, * we meet Margaret Nathan, the brilliant but forgetful author of an unlikely bestseller. Happily married to a benevolently egotistical, slightly dull but sexy professor, Margaret seems blessed—until she finds herself seduced by an eighteenthcentury novel she discovers in the library.Rameau’s Nieceis wise, affecting, and thoroughly entertaining.
Wrapped in its lascivious world, Margaret begins to imitate its protagonist, embarking on a hilarious jaunt around Manhattan in search of renewed passion. Will she find fulfillment through her escapades or settle for her husband? Part romantic comedy, part intellectual parody,Rameau’s Nieceis wise, affecting, and thoroughly entertaining.
*New York Review of Books
A repackage of the Cathleen Schine's 1993Rameau's Niece,a comedy of manners set in New York.
Chapter One
There is a kind of egotism that shrinks the universe; and there was Edward’s kind. It dominated the world not by limiting it, but by generous, almost profligate recognition of everything, like sunlight, illuminating whatever it touched, and touching whatever it could.
Margaret’s husband was a wonder to her, a loud, handsome Englishman, a Jew from Oxford with gray hair that stuck up in tufts, like an East European poet’s, an egotist whose egotism was of such astonishing proportions that he thought the rest of the world quite marvelous simply because it was there with him.
Margaret Nathan was herself a person of no mean ego, although she knew her own egotism shone less like the sun than like a battery-operated flashlight, swinging this way and that way, lighting short narrow paths through the oppressive darkness of other people. Margaret was a demanding person, hard on herself, certainly; harder by far on everyone else.
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