The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, April 2014: Caution: this debut about a retired Connecticut executive dealing with his divorce is not for everyone. It’s too funny, too angry, too slyly subversive, and it might just make you think differently about your own marriage, your friends’ lives, the guy sitting next to you on the train. Our anti-hero, Anders Hill, is the quintessential on-the-rise executive who never quite reached the big-time, getting stranded at a merely comfortable life. He has left his wife, the mother of his children, because he was, well, mostly bored--and now, of course, he is devastated to discover that she’s doing just fine, cohabiting with one of his oldest friends in their marital home. Decent but not terribly well-meaning, Anders is the kind of guy who constantly puts his foot in it: he says the wrong thing, makes the wrong deals, cultivates the wrong people (there’s an early scene involving Anders and his friend’s son that’s priceless). Anders is a patrician buffoon but because author Ted Thompson is such an acute observer, Anders is familiar, even occasionally likable. No wonder Thompson is being touted as this generation’s Updike and The Land of Steady Habits--a perfect description of the upper-middle class bubble life illustrated here--as his Rabbit, Run. --Sara Nelson