MAINE by J. Courtney Sullivan

Alice Kelleher is the elderly matriarch of the Kelleher family and owns a beach house in Maine.  She has made arrangements to donate the property to the local Catholic church in an effort to assuage guilt that has basically dominated her entire adult life.  Maggie, Alice’s granddaughter, is scheduled to come to the beach house with her boyfriend Gabe for the month of June.  However, Maggie and Gabe have had another of their frequent fights and seem to have broken up for good.  Maggie is pregnant with Gabe’s child but hasn’t told him or anyone else.  Maggie’s mother Kathleen now lives in California and raises worms to produce fertilizer.  Alice’s son’s wife Ann Marie appears to be sort of a goodie-two-shoes homemaker, but she sheds that image soon enough.  These four women all converge on the beach house at the same time, and the barbs start to fly.  Where there’s a dysfunctional family, there’s usually some trait or event that feeds the dysfunction, and in this case it’s alcoholism.  Kathleen is now sober, but Alice has decided to go off the wagon now that her husband has passed away.  Maggie is mysteriously abstaining because of her secret pregnancy, and Ann Marie makes an embarrassing and potentially damaging mistake while under the influence, although she does not have a history of alcoholism.  All of these women do have their faults.  Ann Marie likes to have people in her debt.  Alice is unforgiving, even to herself.  Kathleen seems to have her act together but she can be downright mean, especially to Ann Marie.  And Maggie, a writer, who seems to be the central character, is just too vanilla and has horrible taste in men.  I view this author as the antithesis of Philip Roth, who writes exclusively about men.  In this book, the noteworthy characters are all women, and they all have very distinct personalities.  And just when you think you have them all figured out, particularly Kathleen and Ann Marie, they do something completely unexpected.