Newfangled

Debra Monroe has written a novel that tells the funny, poignant story of a woman’s quest for a physical and emotional home. The protagonist, Maidie Bonasso, is on the road—moving from state to state, job to job, from one circle of intimates another, seeking new options and new connections. Maidie’s mother has been missing since 1974. When Maidie left her childhood home in the name of Self-Improvement—a better life—she left behind a father, two sisters who married indistinguishable husbands in a double ceremony, and an ex-stepmother. She hasn’t seen any of them in years. Maidie has one ex-husband in Nebraska, another in Virginia, as well as a host of former neighbors and co-workers who occupy her memory like a Greek chorus. Her psychic baggage alone could fill up a moving van. Just when Maidie is ready to wrench herself free from her latest gig—her job as curator of The Museum of Domestic History and Home Economy—and leave behind a devoted boyfriend and a cluster of quirky, spiteful, loyal friends, she receives a phone call that sends her on yet another journey, offering her the chance to reject or embrace her disconnected, interrupted past. In Newfangled, a woman who’s afraid of knowing anyone very well for very long suddenly finds herself imagining what life would be like if she were to take a chance, to stay.

Intelligent … deliciously wacky … quite entertaining.

—Publisher’s Weekly

Eloquent, intelligent, witty, acute…grimly hilarious. This novel, which charts the evolution of a modern lost soul, and in the process delights heart and mind, is written with the seemingly effortless grace that is the hallmark of true mastery.

—Evelin Sullivan, San Francisco Chronicle

Hard-edged, yet dazzling.

—Library Journal

Monroe’s languid prose skirts across the page with understated elegance, looping gracefully from present to past and back again … a map of the minefield of love, a perfect rainy-day book, a melancholic tale that slowly, surely blossoms into a story of redemption, reconciliation, and that sliver of hope we all rightly hang onto.

—BookPage

Newfangled is suffused with love for humanity, especially for those fools of us who may identify as panting fumblers in the service of love. If you don’t already know the work of Debra Monroe, get thee hence and remedy your lack.

—Tom Doyal, Austin Chronicle

There’s a hard wonder in this book. Madie longs to be normal, but what would that be? Her intelligence tilts the world so we can see it and offers her every encounter an almost hysterical spin. Is this the fate of smart young women? In a novel laden with trenchant notes on our new world, Debra Monroe offers us a lively quest—a woman caught between the romantic and the semantic evaluates all the fangled possibilities for human connection.

—Ron Carlson

Poignant, funny, and relentless in its exploration of what we’ve lost and how we rebuild broken lives…a tough, rewarding novel.

—Judith Rigler, San Antonio Express News

An involving, funny story, full of carefully observed, truthful moments.

—Mary Carroll, Booklist

“The perpetual sun, the deep-dyed faithful sky, the winter that passed like a fugue to be clean forgotten, were what Maidie liked about Arizona.” We know all about that sky. What’s new is Maidie who has “fired and rehired the staff of her life” too many times. Now this devotee of rootlessness has taken a job as curator where she exhibits evidence of long-term attachment: old photographs, colanders, churns, prams, hairpins. This is an eccentric novel, told in narration that moves with such abandon that you have to hang on until you reach firm ground.

—Arizona Republic

Understated and powerful … Newfangled has depth and humor.

—Rosalind Smith, Dallas Morning News

This is a dandy piece of fiction.

—Susan Whitney, Desert News

An incisive view of the disintegration of a modern family. Memories of [Maidie’s] past, of her failed romances, and of the extended families that converge on these recollections, color the fresh start she hoped to make…in Tucson [where] she meets the sexy, if much older, Rex, who rents antiques from the museum for film props, and she also becomes part of the large extended family that takes up much of the neighborhood she lives in. A debut that raises pertinent questions about the fate of modern-day families, and offers some answers in an agreeably sardonic tone.

—Kirkus Reviews

She keeps a clean, cozy house, but she doesn’t keep her husbands. Through its temporal and spatial gymnastics, Newfangled mirrors the havoc that is Maidie’s history. Though the ending is not quite Dickensian—characters don’t end up related or disinherited—a good deal of reconciling goes on in the final part of the story. But Newfangled is wonderful. It’s ambitious; it reaches all over the place. More is widely, wildly knowledgeable. And giving Madie a master’s in sociology (or “sociability,” as she wryly notes), allows Monroe to stuff her novel with arcane knowledge and crisp insights. Madie is living where the old-fashioned (nothing wrong with wanting a companion and a home) and the newfangled (maybe I’ll never settle down) collide. What’s a hard-boiled 35-year-old woman to do? Newfangled offers tentative answers, and every page is smart.

—Maggie Galehouse, Washington Post

Debra Monroe demonstrated with her earliest stories that her gift is large, and Newfangled clinches the point. Her protagonist, Maidie, is funny, charming and sad in equal measure. Ms. Monroe has the great gift of being able to make a goofy face while at the same instant focusing on her characters the smart, penetrating gaze of an archeologist unearthing the fragile past.

—Frederick Busch

This situation of long-divided families, Monroe suggests, has become all too common in our post-industrial, newfangled world. Drawing on contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers, Monroe delves into the havoc created by absent fathers, and mothers who are consequently removed from or somehow inappropriately bonded to, their children. Through Maidie’s almost obsessive recitation of psychoanalytic and sociological insights (many of which are genuinely intriguing), Monroe comments on contemporary theory with just the right dose of parody. Legitimate as they may be, theories, we all know, do not make relationships work. Monroe’s considerable lyric powers allow her to render feeling states vividly…and permits Maidie a true, if tentative, re-examination of the simple pleasures of love.

—Paula Friedman, Austin American-Statesman