White Elephant
A Novel
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3.1 • 26 Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A turf war between neighbors leads to a small-town crisis in this sharply observed debut novel perfect for fans of Tom Perrotta, Meg Wolitzer, and Celeste Ng.
The white elephant looms large over the town of Willard Park: a newly-constructed behemoth of a home, it towers over the quaint houses, including Allison and Ted Millers’ tiny hundred year old home. When owner Nick Cox cuts down the Millers’ precious red maple—in an effort to make his unsightly property more appealing to buyers—their once serene town becomes a battleground.
While tensions between Ted and Nick escalate, other dysfunctions abound: Allison finds herself compulsively drawn to the man who threatens to upend her quietly organized life. A lawyer with a pot habit and a serious mid-life crisis skirts his responsibilities. And in a quest for popularity, a teenage girl gets caught up in a not-so-harmless prank. Newcomers and longtime residents alike clash in conflicting pursuits of the American Dream, with trees mysteriously uprooted, fingers pointed, and lines drawn.
White Elephant is a tangled-web tale of a community on the verge and its all-too-human inhabitants, who long to connect but can’t seem to find the words. It's a story about opposing sides struggling to find a middle ground—a parable for our times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The "white elephant" of Langsdorf's lively and entertaining debut refers to the architectural abomination of a house that's been constructed in Willard Park, a D.C. suburb known for its trees and friendliness. The Millers, who live next door to the White Elephant, find their lives disrupted by the construction of both the house and the swaggering builder behind it, Nick Cox. Allison Miller has to juggle stagnation, in both her creative and sex lives, with a dangerously escalating attraction to Nick, whose very existence antagonizes her husband especially after Nick accidentally fells a tree that Ted and Allison had planted for their daughter, Jillian. Meanwhile, quiet and socially unassuming preteen Jillian is embarking on an illicit friendship with Nick's precocious daughter, Lindy. Besides the Millers and the Coxes, there's also Suzanne and Grant Davenport-Gardner, new to the neighborhood after Grant was fired from his last job at a law firm for smoking weed. As the lives of these Willard Park residents overlap and intersect over a six-month period, affairs are conducted, houses are built and knocked down, and a community is irreversibly changed. As with many ensemble novels, some characters do not get the development they deserve, most notably Nick's wife, Kaye, a flighty-seeming Southern belle. Nevertheless, this ambitious and intriguing work about the American suburbs is perfect for fans of Ann Patchett or Meg Wolitzer.
