OPINION:
WHITE ELEPHANT
By Julie Langsdorf
Ecco, $26.99, 309 pages
Although this is a Washington novel — its fictitious setting is Willard Park — its scope is definitely much broader, and may even be universal.
What makes it broader is its contemporary theme. A young couple, the Coxes, move into a settled neighborhood of older, attractive and mostly smaller houses just across the Washington, D.C., line in what appears to be Maryland. The husband, a wealthy builder, tears down a quaint old house and erects a McMansion, the “white elephant” of the title.
What makes it universal is this neophyte novelist’s treatment of relationships, especially those between mothers and their teen-age daughters. While I claim no subjective knowledge here, I found this neophyte novelist’s depictions of the ongoing dramas between mothers and daughters totally credible. Author Julie Langsdorf’s depiction of adult affairs — double entendre there — is hard to believe at times, but the scenes between mothers and daughters seem oh-so-true.
As the book opens, it’s early morning, and the Coxes’ next-door neighbors, Allison and Ted Miller, a couple in their 40s are lying in bed. She’s thinking of sex, but he of trees. When she reaches over to signal her desire, he says, “Do you know what time is it, Al?” Ouch.
One of the reasons Allison is thinking about sex is that she misses Valeria, her BFF, who moved to Paris.
While walking her dog, Allison encounters the Coxes, and their casually sexy byplay embarrasses her. “Oh! It was all Valeria’s fault, she’d found a way to fight back at the ennui, escaping to Europe, leaving Allison behind to circle the streets of suburbia with a husband who was more passionate about a tree than he was about his wife.” This husband-with-a-headache is a nice touch.
Ted, the un-amorous inamorata, is thinking about trees because his new neighbor has been cutting down some not-yet-mature trees to give his huge new house more sunlight. And then Nick Cox goes too far. He cuts down the red maple that the Millers had planted to mark the birth of their daughter Jillian, who is now teen-ager and a classmate of the Coxes’ daughter, Lindsey, aka Lindy.
Allison and Ted Miller would like to re-create Willard Park in its own original image, but Nick Cox would prefer to buy up and knock down all vestiges of that quaint originality, and replace them with a thundering herd of white elephants just like the one he built for himself and his family.
The townspeople take sides, and eventually there’s a proposal before the village council for a moratorium on new building. As the proposal makes its slow way to a vote, Ms. Langsdorf fills in her canvas.
Lindy, who dominates both her friends and her mother, is as enviable as the Coxes’ many material possessions. She’s pretty (and knows it) and pretty conceited (ditto) and — gasp! — has her own credit card.
One of the things that kept me from liking this novel more is that the author satirizes all her characters, even a neighbor’s precocious 5-year-old son. “I counted seventy-three boxes, Mommy, and the man with the mustache is named Juan and you spell it with a J, and he’s from Guadalajara, and that’s spelled with a G, and he doesn’t have a green card but he wants one. Can I make him one, Mommy?” And when she asks the tiny genius if he’d like a milkshake, he replies, “I want a tall skim half-caf latte and a hazelnut biscoti.”
Violence alert: The reader is tempted to give all three of them — the kid, the mother and the author — a smack.
The trouble with this kind of writing is that you don’t know which of the characters you’re supposed to like, if any. Call me weird, but when I read a novel, I like to like some of the characters.
Eventually, “White Elephant” gets more interesting. Lindy Cox and Jillian Miller become actual friends, though Jillian doesn’t dare tell her parents. Also, the author cleverly inserts a sub-plot. Someone is going around Willard Park cutting down trees, and his or her identity is kept secret, whodunit-like, until the end.
Julie Langsdorf can write, no doubt about it. I will watch for her second novel, but I hope that next time around she resists the temptation to make fun of all her otherwise well-drawn characters.
• John Greenya, a Washington writer and critic, is the author of “Gorsuch: The Judge Who Speaks For Himself” (Simon and Schuster, 2018).
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