101. The Nest
Rating: ☆☆☆1/2
Recommended by:
Author: Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney
Genre: Fiction
368 pages, published March 22, 2016
Reading Format: Book
Summary
The Nest follows the four dysfunctional siblings in the Plumb family who are thrown a curve ball when “the nest,” the name given to their sizable expected inheritance, is substantially reduced to pay for brother Leo’s recklessness. Leo’s siblings, Melody, Beatrice, and Jack Plumb gather in downtown New York City to confront the charismatic and irresponsible older brother Leo. We soon learn that all of the Plumbs have been counting on money from “the nest” to solve their self-inflicted problems. Melody, a wife and mother in an upscale suburb, has an unwieldy mortgage and looming college tuition for her twin teenage daughters. Jack, an antiques dealer, has secretly borrowed against the beach cottage he shares with his husband, Walker, to keep his store open. Bea, a once-promising short-story writer is struggling to finish her overdue novel. Brought together by Leo’s irresponsibility, the Plumbs must ultimately acknowledge the choices they have made in their own lives.
Quotes
“They’d fallen into their old ways, accusatory and evasive, which was reassuring in a perverted way. Leo understood the nasty pull of the regrettable familiar, how the old grooves could be so much more satisfying than the looming unknown. It’s addicts stayed addicts.”
“She supposed she could Google, but she preferred to wonder.”
“This was the part she hated, the part of a relationship that always nudged her to bail, the part where someone else’s misery or expectations or neediness crept into her carefully prescribed world. It was such a burden, other people’s lives.”
“Parents are temporary custodians, keeping watch and offering love and trying to leave the child better than they found him.”
“People might not change but their incentives could.”
“If you want to predict a person’s behavior, identify his or her incentives.”
“If you want people to judge you based on the inside, don’t distract them from the outside.”
“People abandoned one another constantly without performing the courtesy of of actually disappearing. They left, but didn’t, lurking about, a constant reminder of what could or should have been.”
“She was so much better at being alone; being alone came more naturally to her. She led a life of deliberate solitude, and if occasional loneliness crept in, she knew how to work her way out of that particular divot. Or even better, how to sink in and absorb its particular comforts.”
My Take
I have long had an interest in stories about how money affects families and The Nest is one of the better ones that I have encountered. While I was worked at a large law firm in Los Angeles, I had several discussions with our estate planning attorneys about how debilitating and corrupting it is for adult children to depend on their parents for support. The more money, the more of a problem. The Nest reinforces this conclusion as we see adults in the 40’s sink into bitter recriminations when an expected inheritance fails to materialize. Sweeney captures this condition and also offers the reader several compelling character studies.
