The Vacationers

The October selection for my book club was The Vacationers by Emma Straub.  I was not impressed. This is a very vacuous novel about an American family's two week vacation to Mallorca.  Franny and Jim Post are ostensibly celebrating their 35th wedding anniversary but we soon discover that Jim has been unfaithful with a much younger intern at his office and has, consequently, lost his job. Franny wants to use this vacation to think about the future of their marriage.  Their daughter Sylvia, who is about to leave for college, has decided that this vacation is the perfect opportunity to lose her virginity. Their ne'er-do-well son Bobby is having financial difficulties and is trying to find a way to ask them for a rather sizable loan. Bobby's girlfriend Carmen, whom everyone dislikes because she is older than Bobby, wants a commitment from him. Franny's best friend Charles and his husband Lawrence are on a short-list to adopt a baby but Charles is having second thoughts. Obviously, the perfect vacation envisioned by Franny does not go according to plan.  Through much of this novel, I kept waiting for something, anything, to happen.  The plot was so predictable and riddled with cliches that I almost abandoned it several times. I kept thinking it would get better because it received such glowing reviews. It didn't.  The characters whine and complain (while lying around the pool) and never really deal with the underlying problems in their lives.  Furthermore, all of the characters are completely unlikable people who do some really despicable things to each other! They are so unsympathetic that I was a bit disappointed when none of them got any sort of comeuppance!  The resolution was just a little bit too perfect for me and it definitely wasn't satisfying.  This is another one of those times when I wonder if I've read the same book that everyone else did...