Lorna Mott Comes Home

A Novel

By: Diane Johnson

Narrated by: Maggi-Meg Reed

Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins

Publisher's summary

From the author of the best-selling Le Divorce and Le Mariage, a comedy of contemporary manners, morals, (ex-)marriages, and motherhood (past, present, and future) - about an American woman leaving her 20-year marriage to her French second husband, returning to her native San Francisco and to the entwining lives of her children and grandchildren.

“Delightful.” (Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine)

“Razor-sharp prose and astute observations...a treat.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

Lorna Mott Dumas, small, pretty, high-strung, the epitome of a successful woman - lovely offspring, grandchildren, health, a French husband, a delightful house, and an independent career as an admired art lecturer involving travel and public appearances, plus expensive clothes. She's a woman with an uncomplicated, sociable nature and an intellectual life.

But in an impulsive and planned decision, Lorna has decided to leave her husband, a notorious tombeur (seducer), and his small ancestral village in France, and return to America, much more suited to her temperament than the rectitude of formal, starchy France. For Lorna, a beautiful idyll is over, finished, done....

In Lorna Mott Comes Home, Diane Johnson brings us into the dreamy, anxiety-filled American world of Lorna Mott Dumas, where much has changed and where she struggles to create a new life to support herself. Into the mix - her ex-husband, and the father of her three grown children (all supportive), and grandchildren with their own troubles (money, divorce, real estate, living on the fringe; a thriving software enterprise; a missing child in the far east; grandchildren - new hostages to fortune; and, one, 15 years old, a golden girl yet always different, diagnosed at a young age with diabetes, and now pregnant and determined to have the child)....

In the midst of a large cast, the precarious balance of comedy and tragedy, happiness and anxiety, contentment and striving, generosity and greed, love and sex, Diane Johnson, our Edith Wharton of expat life, comes home to America to deftly, irresistibly portray, with the lightest of touch, the way we live now.

©2021 Diane Johnson (P)2021 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Briskly witty...delightful...an engaging confection...clever, dry, and often highly amusing.” (Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine)

“Johnson returns with undimmed joie de vivre to the delicious Francophile vein she mined so successfully in her National Book Award finalist Le Divorce.... Everything one looks forward to in Johnson's books is delivered in abundance here: nimble plotting, witty narration, edifying juxtaposition of French and American cultures.... Johnson's social and moral insight are condensed into pithy one-liners that begin each chapter.... She also excels at evoking people's misconstruals of others' behavior and various delicate inner states.... Doing what she does best, Johnson shows us why she's been compared to writers like Henry James, Jane Austen, and Voltaire.” (Kirkus, starred review)

“Delightfully absurd...incisive...Johnson gently but deftly skewers everyone as they scheme for financial gain and languorously search for meaning and happiness.” (Booklist)

Painful Listening

This might have been a fun read but the narration was terrible—lacking inflection and an irritating high pitched voice. I couldn’t get through more than a couple of chapters.

Ms. Johnson is amazing!

For me, the most astonishing thing about this novel, “Lorna Mott Comes Home” is that the author, Diane Johnson is 87 year-old!! The fact that she crafted this hilarious comedy of errors and manners at her age is to me, truly amazing! Ms. Johnson provides hope that losing one’s mental acuity in one’s 80’s is not a given.

Lorna Mott, our protagonist, is a sixty-something divorcee returning to the USA after living in a small Provencal village in France for 20 years. Her second husband is a philanderer, and she is tired of it. She decides she will return to the San Francisco area where her three adult children live. She intends to restart her profession as an art historian. Sadly, she finds the USA not the same as when she left. She finds herself, well, irrelevant. She becomes increasingly frustrated with her plight as she attempts to re-establishes her career.

Meanwhile, all three adult children seem to be plagued with money issues. Lorna herself needs funds. Her first husband, Ran, the father of her children, remarried a dot-com millionaire and he has a 15-year-old daughter with his second wife. Lorna is frustrated with Ran that he hasn’t appeared to financially help his adult children. Those three children and their marriages are fodder for fun. For example, their son is in a coma at the beginning of the story after a tragic bicycle accident. When he awakes he disappears to Thailand leaving his wife and twins with a million-dollar mortgage and no income. One daughter is selling crafts on the internet to make money. And their youngest son is a hippie living in a questionable neighborhood.

The fun in this novel is the back stories and character development. Johnson is on top of her craft. It’s like reading a soap opera with crazy turns of events. Johnson begins each chapter with clever one-liners such as “Pace Freud, does talking about a problem always make us feel better?” “Enjoying the company of friends is a reliable human impulse.” My favorite: “There’s no gossip like family gossip.” Additionally, her observations and wry humor makes this the perfect summer charming read. “Californians are optimistic most of the time.”

Johnson brings the family together with an unexpected pregnancy which comically unites the family. All the cast of characters are interesting in their own right.

I listened to the audio production, narrated by Maggi-Meg Reed. Reed is perfectly cast as there is much French, and her French pronunciations made the story interesting and delightful.

Huge plot

Very entertaining story - fairly complex plot - interesting upper-middle class demographic. Altogether, very enjoyable story!

Comedy of Manners and Morals

Where do we belong? Who is our family? If we realize our ambitions are we really going to be happy? To whom are we responsible? This novel asks these questions and gives us some answers, but leaves other answers in the ether. Diane Johnson proves again that she sees our blindspots, sees through our little lies to ourselves, and still can write about it all with compassion. I used to think that you had to hate all of your characters to produce good satire, but this novel has shown me that that isn't the case at all.

A light diversion, but not highly engaging

I had thought that this would be an enjoyable, if light, diversion-- a nice summer read. After an interesting opening, though, with its descriptions of the multiple challenges and transitions with which the protagonist is faced, I soon found myself losing interest. It did not help matters that, within the first few chapters, there are multiple inexplicable redundancies, including repetitive summaries of plaints such as Nora's ex-husband's failure to provide any support for their adult children, and who is married to whom, and who is the child or grandchild of whom (as if the reader would be incapable of keeping track of these relationships from one brief chapter to the next), I mainly stuck with it for a little while longer because the narrator is excellent. Ultimately though, as I lost empathy for pretty much everyone except Nora's granddaughter, I found myself unable to stay with it.

My rating says it all

There was nothing about this book that I liked. The narration made the voices of all the characters seem trite, of course it could be that is what the author intended as all the characters in the book, even Laura. The character Laura, was pretty trite, but to me it made the book even more boring. Frankly, I could not identify with any of the characters as they all seemed extremely juvenile or needy. I would have returned the book, but it was a book club selection and I felt it necessary to listen to the entire book. I kept hoping the book would get better but it never did. Unless you want to waste a credit get a different book.

Don’t Read This Book

If you’re only interests in life are personal greed, family greed, whining about money and nasty, unsympathetic, unloving, sardonic people then you’ll love this book. Money and begrudging others who have money is the theme of this book. Love is spoken about but never emerges as a real possibility for movement or change. Whining cold fish do San Fran and want more money, should be the title. Everyone is nasty.