A Perfect Arrangement
By Suzanne Berne. Algonquin Books, 301 pages, $23.95.

Everyday drama and darkness has always been favored territory for writers. So in today’s culture of anxious parenting and paranoia, what better bugaboo to embody the subconscious fears of upper middle-class America than the nanny from hell? A Perfect Arrangement, Suzanne Berne’s second novel, opens with a typical morning for the Cook-Goldman family in their North Shore home. Lawyer Mirella attempts to eat breakfast, keep toddler Jacob out of the butter dish, hustle five-year-old Pearl to school, and update husband Howard on their latest child-care prospect. In the midst of this chaos, she considers what it would be like to stay at home with the children, imagining “Block castles, Play-Doh birthday cakes, afternoons at the parks” in a Martha Stewart vision that then dissolves into “a quicksand of dirty cups and dishes, hours draining into the laundry basket, trips to the park that took so long to prepare for that by the time everyone was ready, no one wanted to go.” Now grateful, she heads for her Boston office, “because the law, unlike her family, was beautifully reducible.”

Berne is expert at placing such sharp, honest insights in the midst of benign domesticity. She also has an authoritative eye for the SUVs and restaurant-quality appliances of upwardly mobile contemporary life circa 1998. Mirella wants it all, and with the arrival of Randi, the dream nanny, she may just get her wish. Never mind that Randi is a chronic liar, something Mirella won’t discover until this perfect arrangement is well on its way to unraveling. The children love Randi. She bakes cookies with them, plays games, and makes it her personal mission to teach Jacob — who may have developmental problems — to speak his first words.

It doesn’t take long for the familiar theme of trouble-in-suburbia to surface, a subject Berne probed with psychological acuity in A Crime in the Neighborhood, her 1997 novel about the rape and murder of a 12-year-old boy from a sleepy DC subdivision. Howard confesses to an affair with a fellow architect just as Mirella discovers she is pregnant with twins. Delighted to be the rock in this dysfunctional storm, Randi continues to churn out healthful turkey loaves and foster an unnaturally close bond with Pearl and Jacob while their parents pick up the pieces and try to keep their careers on track. A wistful Mirella recalls the ease of their unmarried life in a Somerville garret: “It had seemed like good fortune itself to be young then, to own almost nothing . . . yet sure that there would be a house for them someday, and children, and all the suitable, practical, immoderate things that go with life if you are certain people and have a certain future.” Satirical and sympathetic by turns, Berne’s novel depicts what happens when our wants, needs, and expectations bang up against reality, and how an answered prayer can turn into a curse.

Randi, of course, has her own agenda: she’s a runaway from a gritty Midwestern existence that she shared with her mother, a single parent without the sophistication of Mirella’s flowing silk skirts and patterned velvet scarves. Being a nanny allows Randi to inject herself into a life she’s seen only in House Beautiful photo spreads, and she soon promotes herself from employee to de facto lady of the house, putting herself on a direct collision course with Mirella.

As the narrative point of view shifts from one character’s perspective to the next, Berne creates an almost suffocating sense of foreboding, ratcheting up the stakes. Even the landscape seems pregnant with anticipation: “the daylilies had opened overnight, reflecting pumpkin orange in the still blue water of the swimming pool. . . . Near the fence, roses bloomed as big as softballs, cream and pink, their fringed yellow hearts bursting.” Yet when the end does come, it’s swift and not altogether convincing. With so many plot lines to resolve, perhaps it’s not surprising that what should be the most dramatic scenes in Berne’s novel seem overwrought and a bit forced. There’s blood, hair pulling, and a few other ugly surprises before Howard and Mirella show the first glimmer of understanding that their lives won’t always proceed according to plan. In this book about children and their overwhelming needs, Berne seems to remind us that adults can be just as blindly singleminded when it comes to having their way.

Issue Date: May 24-31, 2001