“A story of sex and intrigue set amid rich people in a beautiful house with a picturesque swimming pool . . . Very funny.” —Rumaan Alam, The Washington PostA brilliantly funny novel of bad behavior in the post-Obama era, featuring a wealthy Connecticut divorcée, her college-age daughter, and the famous novelist who is seduced by them both.Rachel Klein never meant to kiss her creative writing … Klein never meant to kiss her creative writing professor, but with his long eyelashes, his silky hair, and the sad, beautiful life he laid bare on Twitter, she does, and the kiss is very nice. Zahid Azzam never planned to become a houseguest in his student’s sprawling Connecticut home, but with the sparkling swimming pool, the endless supply of Whole Foods strawberries, and Rachel’s beautiful mother, he does, and the home is very nice. Becca Klein never thought she’d have a love affair so soon after her divorce, but when her daughter’s professor walks into her home, bringing with him an apricot standard poodle named Princess, she does, and the affair is . . . a very bad idea.
Zigzagging between the rarefied circles of Manhattan investment banking, the achingly self-serious MFA programs of the Midwest, and the private bedrooms of Connecticut, Very Nice is an audacious, addictive, and wickedly smart take on the way we live now.
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Better than very nice, this book is glorious. Fast, funny, and filled with memorably brilliant characters.
Very Nice features a very spoiled apricot poodle, very yummy breakfasts of avocado toast, and a very naughty mother-daughter-professor love triangle — it’s everything you need in your new favorite summer novel, and makes me very relieved I never got my PhD.
Very Nice is deceptively polite, a gracious rebuke to every writer who has sworn it’s impossible to write about the times in which we live. Marcy Dermansky found the way in, spotted the connections holding our fragmented world together and made them sing. Her best book to date, which is saying quite a lot.
Cringe-inducing. Every single character is horrendously selfish – not a single one of them worth rooting for. The “story” (?) is non-existent, since it’s basically just an exploration of people’s myopic self-centeredness (and don’t even get me started on that ending – ridiculous). Dermansky’s writing is a bit uneven, and in the beginning, especially during Rachel’s chapters, the sentences are stupidly short. The only redeeming quality for me was that this was a fast read so I got it over with quickly.
This book was fun, and funny and poignant and thought-provoking all at once, which is really tough to do. The story opens with 19-year-old Rachel Klein (who I’m pretty sure attends my alma mater, an unnamed certain liberal arts college up the Hudson River from NYC) ill-advisedly kissing her creative writing professor, the handsome, disaffected Zahid Azzam. Zahid is a young-ish Pakistani author whose sole novel, his debut, was critically acclaimed; a novel that he himself says was “easy” to write. The literary success came easily but the maintenance of it, and the earning of a sustainable income is not quite as easy. He kisses and then sleeps with his young student because that, too, is easy and in the moment, the path of least resistance.
The ‘path of least resistance’ basically sums of Zahid’s life — he trips into things and lets them play out, even when he sees that the consequences could be dire. It is in this way that he trips into a prolonged stay at Rachel’s house in Connecticut with her newly-separated mother and there, things get very, very complicated. Swirling around Zahid and Rachel are a cast of interesting characters, like Zahid’s best friend, Kristi who is trying her darnedest to drag him kicking and screaming into adulthood, Kristi’s twin sister, the callous Khloe who has been nurturing a fixation for over a decade on someone she should not love but believes she does. And then there are Rachel’s parents–Becca her mother who finds herself drawn to Zahid even while she suspects Rachel’s interest in him, and Jonathan, her father, who is having a good old-fashioned midlife crisis that leads him to make the cliched mistake of believing there is something more exciting and satisfying out there than the reliability his marriage.
This book is precisely what I needed in this strange time–it has just the right amount of social commentary (scathing observations on race, class, the literati and the publishing industry) and snarky, intelligent humor to both amuse me and make me think. The characters, drawn with such a deft touch are incredibly complicated and multi-dimensional though they think and do things that are sometimes startlingly shallow.
Don’t let the almost glib tone fool you. There are some very pointed and deep portrayals here, of people just trying to figure it all out, and all too often making a colossal mess in the process. Recommended.
My first read of 2020 was a gas! Marcy Dermansky is a funny, clever, smart writer, and I breezed through this novel in two days. She does a beautiful job of creating five distinct voices for five distinct characters, each of whom has a clear intention. Then she ensures that each character’s goal is in direct conflict with another character’s goal. Dermansky’s characters are refreshingly unique, including money-obssessed Khloe, a lesbian whose love for her former babysitter goes unrequited, and self-absorbed Zahid, the wunderkind writer who deludes himself into thinking he’s more interested in those around him than he is. By the end of the novel the clashing intentions of all these characters come to a head and I raced through the final pages to see who was going to come out the winner. I would have to say that prize goes to Dermansky.
Marcy is a great story teller and she has a very funny but dry sense of humor. The book is wicked and emotional as she explores our relationship to ourselves as well as others.
Marcy Dermansky is a light switch, a volume knob, a fire drill. Her novels are bright and attention-grabbing, from the first page to the last, and Very Nice is her best yet. This smart, sexy, funny book is a balm for rattled nerves. Write me a thousand more books, Marcy, and I’ll read them all.
Very Nice is so sexy and reads so smooth that I was utterly addicted. Trenchantly observed and darkly funny, it will stick with you long after you finish its final, ferocious sentence.