Ted Thompson. (2014). The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel. Little, Brown and Company.

Ted Thompson. 2014. The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel. Little, Brown and Company.

Ted Thompson, The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel. Little, Brown and Company, 2014.

Ted Thompson. The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel. Little, Brown and Company, 2014.

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   • bioText: Ted Thompson is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he was awarded a Truman Capote Fellowship. His work has appeared in Tin House and Best New American Voices, among other publications. He was born in Connecticut and lives in Brooklyn with his wife.
   • name: Ted Thompson

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Ted Thompson's shrewdly funny and finely observed novel about a man who must reckon with the high cost of the good life. A major motion picture streaming on Netflix, directed by Nicole Holofcener, and starring Ben Mendelsohn, Edie Falco, and Connie Britton.
For Anders Hill, long ensconced in the affluent, insular villages of suburban Connecticut that some call "the land of steady habits," it's finally time to reap the rewards of his sensibly-lived life. Newly retired after decades of doing everything right, Anders finds that the contentment he's been promised is still just out of reach. So he decides he's had enough of stability: he leaves his wife, buys a condo, and waits for freedom to transform him.
But as the cheery charade of Christmas approaches, Anders starts to wonder if parachuting out of his old life was the most prudent choice. Stripped of the comforts of his previous identity, Anders turns up at a holiday party full of his ex-wife's friends and is surprised to find that the very world he rejected may be the one he needs the most. Thus Anders embarks on a clumsy, hilarious, and heartbreaking journey to reconcile his past with his present.
Reminiscent of the early work of Updike and Cheever, Ted Thompson writes with a striking compassion for his characters and fresh insight into the American tradition of the suburban narrative.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: STARRED Booklist
   • content: Filled with heartache and humor, this assured, compassionate first novel channels the suburban angst of Updike and Cheever, updating the narrative of midlife dissatisfaction with a scathing dissection of America's imploding economy...with pitch-perfect prose and endearingly melancholy characters, Thompson offers up a heartbreaking vision of an ailing family and country.
2. • premium: False
   • source: Maggie Shipstead, author of Seating Arrangements
   • content: With impeccable prose, dry wit, and uncommon wisdom, Ted Thompson brings to life one family's painful disappointments and powerful resilience. The Land of Steady Habits combines Austen's shrewd mastery of domestic economics with Updike's compassion for the melancholy commuter to make something elegant, fresh, and brilliant.
3. • premium: False
   • source: Charles D'Ambrosio, author of The Point and The Dead Fish Museum
   • content: In his beautiful and generously imagined debut, Ted Thompson will rightly draw comparisons to other chroniclers of suburban life -Updike, Cheever-but I think we need to dig deeper into the tradition-to John O'Hara-because The Land of Steady Habits is our Appointment in Samarra and Anders Hill is our Julian English. Whether it's a society built on coal or one collapsing under the weight of credit default swaps, both novels explore what ails America by looking into the wrecked hearts of those who seem to have everything and now must reckon the high cost of the good life. Over the course of a single holiday season, Thompson takes Anders on a tragicomic ride, through exile and redemption, until a new kind of hero emerges, human and fallible, a man who becomes more for having accepted less and finds greatness because he chooses decency. Fearless and tremendously moving , The Land of Steady Habits tells a story we need to hear and announces the arrival of a voice we should all welcome.
4. • premium: False
   • source: Sarah Vowell, author of Unfamiliar Fishes and Assassination Vacation
   • content: It would probably never occur to New England white people that they are an ethnicity, but this sharp and funny saga of a Connecticut family unraveling is a detailed natural history of upper crust suburbanites and how they live (and drink). The reader learns not to take good fortune and loved ones for granted—and also that a liquor store owner in Westport will never starve.
5. • premium: False
   • source: Darin Strauss, author of Half Life and More Than It Hurts You
   • content: Ted Thompson will be weighed against some famous Johns — Updike and Cheever — for the usual wrong reasons. (Suburbs, separation.) But the comparison is apt in all the ways that matter: because the prose is sumptuous, the characterizations economically brilliant, the themes still important and universal. Because this is a great book. And readers who sample its riches will be greedy to scoop up the entire treasure of it. And so, ladies and gentlemen, we may have found our generation's Rabbit, Run.
6. • premium: False
   • source: Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love
   • content: A book that is funny, shrewd, and heartbreaking by turns, The Land of Steady Habits concerns the lost-and-found souls of Connecticut and Manhattan, and at every point this novel offers both pleasure and insight into its cast of characters. You don't expect a first novel to be as inward and worldly as this one is, and at the same time to be so readable. Ted Thompson's dialogue is so good, so unerring, that he must have perfect pitch. A wonderful debut.
7. • premium: False
   • source: -Kirkus Reviews
   • content: Thompson's sharp-eyed debut is that kind of searing portrait of American wealth unraveling that is both dazzling and immeasurably sad.
8. • premium: False
   • source: The Wall Street Journal Magazine
   • content: Ted Thompson's elegiac yet bighearted take on adult disillusionment earns its comparisons to suburbans bards such as Updike and Cheever.
9. • premium: False
   • source: NY1's The Book Reader
   • content: Ted Thompson's terrific debut novel, The Land of Steady Habits, feels like a natural extension of Yates' classic Revolutionary Road or Updike's Rabbit series. Call this elegant, witty and economical novel Rabbit, Meltdown. It's not a stretch to say that this is the first great novel about post-crash American disillusionment.
10. • premium: False
    • source: extended state of adolescence
    • content: In this impressive debut, Thompson delivers a vivid portrait of life in America's suburban upper crust explored through a splintering family. Through sharply written prose and fiery dialogue, Thompson's characters come alive:...
11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      January 6, 2014
      Late-life divorce is the subject of Thompson’s acutely written first novel. Approaching retirement age, Anders Hill is recently divorced from his wife, Helene. They have two adult children, who don’t seem especially fond of their father, especially the troubled younger one, Preston, who has yet to find himself. But as lost as Preston is, he is still in much better condition than Charlie, the substance-abusing, preppy son of Helene’s best friends who inexplicably turns to Anders for support, this at a time when Anders is having difficulty supporting himself, both financially and spiritually. Things become even more complicated when Anders finds out that Helene is living in his old house with a new lover, Donny, a mutual friend from their college days. As a wickedly sharp framing device, Anders’s travails come to a head during the Christmas season. This novel is basically a series of confrontations, but Thompson is a master at dramatically pitting one character against another. The story takes place in Connecticut, and the author proves to be as keen an observer of this social scene as his literary forebears, Cheever and Updike. Anders, Helene, their children, lovers and friends, might not be the most likable group of characters you’ll come across, but the author humanizes them in a way that makes their problems relatable.

12. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      February 15, 2014
      That particularly American novel, examining the soul-crushing consequences of suburban prosperity, is modernized here as a successful financier looks around his life and sees a wasteland. Southerner Anders Hill went to great lengths to avoid the upstanding conformity his father had planned for him, but at age 60, he's not sure what difference it's made. Sickened by the greed of Wall Street and his own personal culpability in all sorts of financial collateral damage, Anders embarks on a kind of slash-and-burn approach to his life: He opts for early retirement, asks his wife, Helene, for a divorce (kindly put on hold for a year while she recovers from a double mastectomy), stops paying the mortgage on their colonial and holes up in a condo he furnishes with Winslow Homer posters and decorative lobster traps. Anders' existential crisis, simmering for 20 years, is a rejection of everything he's built--the beautiful house in a tony Connecticut bedroom community (think Greenwich), two sons and a lovely wife--but now what? Meanwhile, thanks to Facebook, Helene has a boyfriend, Donny, who was Anders' college roommate and Helene's college boyfriend. An outcast among their friends, Anders has formed an unlikely friendship with Charlie, the rebellious teenage son of Mitchell and Sophie Ashby. After smoking PCP with Charlie at a holiday party (which sends Charlie to the hospital), Anders begins to fall apart in subtle but disturbing ways. Anders and Helene's son Preston is an adult version of Charlie. After a wasted youth following Phish, dealing drugs, and beginning and quitting various programs and colleges, he finally has a college degree but not enough sense to use it. The three stages of the Connecticut man--Charlie, Preston and Anders--in this land of steady habits, have the instinct to rebel but lack the imagination to live happily. Thompson's sharp-eyed debut is that kind of searing portrait of American wealth unraveling that is both dazzling and immeasurably sad.

      COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      January 1, 2014
      

      As a rebellious teen, Anders Hill rejects his father's plans for his future and succeeds on his own. In doing so, he finds himself in the land of steady habits, commuting to a finance job in Manhattan from a bedroom community in Connecticut. Now in his 60s, Anders realizes that the underlying satisfaction of having achieved success is eroded by his certainty that this is not the life he is meant to lead. The idyllic world he has created for himself unravels in one horrific year when he quits his job, divorces his wife, abandons his children, and befriends a neighbor's son, who then commits suicide. Anders is at a new crossroads; is the life he gave up the one he was destined to live? VERDICT Thompson, a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, crafts a story replete with characters searching for something other than what they have. Fans of John Updike will enjoy this book by a young, upcoming writer. Recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 10/28/13.]--Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence

      Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from January 1, 2014
      Filled with heartache and humor, this assured, compassionate first novel channels the suburban angst of Updike and Cheever, updating the narrative of midlife dissatisfaction with a scathing dissection of America's imploding economy. Financier Anders Hill seems to have it all: he's ensconced in a beautiful house in a wealthy Connecticut suburb, his children's college tuition has finally been paid, and he can now retire, freed from the weight of a soul-sucking job. But what he seems to want most is to blow up his entire life. He divorces his wife, buys a condo, and decides to attend the annual Christmas party of his old neighbors, where, surrounded by his ex-wife's close friends, he unravels in spectacularly hilarious fashion, fueled mostly by vitriol and partly by the PCP he's smoked with his neighbors' teenage son. By the time Anders realizes that he might have made an error in judgmenton all countshis ex-wife has taken up with an old boyfriend (Anders' college roommate) and his sons are entirely out of patience with dear old dad. How Anders forges his path to redemption, for both personal and professional sins, is not to be missed. With pitch-perfect prose and endearingly melancholy characters, Thompson offers up a heartbreaking vision of an ailing family and country.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

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Ted Thompson's shrewdly funny and finely observed novel about a man who must reckon with the high cost of the good life. A major motion picture streaming on Netflix, directed by Nicole Holofcener, and starring Ben Mendelsohn, Edie Falco, and Connie Britton.
For Anders Hill, long ensconced in the affluent, insular villages of suburban Connecticut that some call "the land of steady habits," it's finally time to reap the rewards of his sensibly-lived life. Newly retired after decades of doing everything right, Anders finds that the contentment he's been promised is still just out of reach. So he decides he's had enough of stability: he leaves his wife, buys a condo, and waits for freedom to transform him.
But as the cheery charade of Christmas approaches, Anders starts to wonder if parachuting out of his old life was the most prudent choice. Stripped of the comforts of his previous identity, Anders turns up at a holiday party full of his ex-wife's friends and is...

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