Maggie Darling
A Modern Romance
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
In this “wonderfully entertaining” novel, a famous domestic diva finds her perfect life falling to pieces (Candace Bushnell, author of Sex and the City).
She’s the goddess of hearth and home, America’s millionaire media maven of domesticity, Connecticut’s most dazzling hostess, and everything in her world is perfect—except that Maggie Darling’s picture-book life has suddenly gone off the rails.
Amid the extravagant trappings of a Christmas Eve bash, she spies her swinish stockbroker husband slipping out of a powder room moments after his creamy young colleague. The ensuing matrimonial meltdown launches Maggie on a year of romance and misadventure, starting with an ill-fated fling with a British rock star-turned-movie-actor. Back home, a sniper is loose on the Merritt Parkway and a gang known as the Businessman’s Lunch Posse is terrorizing patrons of Manhattan’s four-star restaurants. Meanwhile, Maggie’s son Hooper drops out of college and falls into the company of the sinister gangsta rap group Chill Az Def.
As calamity piles on catastrophe, even Maggie Darling’s legendary organizational skills may not be able to restore civilization as we wish we knew it . . .
“Deliciously funny.” —Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kunstler's first novel in over 10 years reflects, in deliciously funny and satiric fashion, some of his spirited nonfiction critiques of contemporary culture (The City in Mind; The Geography of Nowhere). Maggie Darling is a mid-career Martha Stewart type and aptly described media darling. But when her millionaire husband, Kenneth, snogs a pretty young thing during Maggie's celebrity-studded, career-enhancing Christmas party, "the goddess of hearth and home" faces a test of her prodigious inner resources. Maggie's picaresque romantic adventures begin with an affair in Venice with a British rock icon turned movie actor, followed by a misguided evening with a besotted photographer and a weekend in Vermont with her charming but disingenuous editor. Kunstler's details are perfect: the mouth-watering menus, the designer clothes, the name-dropping of celebrities both fictional and real. Maggie struggles to sort out a variety of betrayals and romantic disappointments while also building her multimillion-dollar catering, book and television empire. Items on her to-do list include attending to Lindy, her heartbroken, drug-addled college friend; hosting her son as he takes a break from Swarthmore and makes some dubious professional associations; and dealing with the death by sniper of her beloved gardener. While most of the secondary characters serve only as foils for Maggie and her grand dilemmas, Kunstler's great achievement is the creation of a surprisingly well-rounded and sympathetic heroine. Maggie isn't insensitive her compulsive list making is a coping mechanism. And though Kunstler betrays his heroine as the plot devolves into farce, loose ends tie up as pretty as a Christmas bow and the novel radiantly succeeds as a contemporary comedy of manners.
