Lipman is one of our best comic novelists, with a gift for creating vivid characters and planting them in awkward positions; it's great fun to watch her characters squirm their way out of the messes they've gotten into.
Her principal character this time is 16-year-old Frederica Hatch, who has grown up in a dormitory at a small women's college in Boston, where her parents are professors and house parents. She has been something of a campus mascot since birth, and is beginning to feel frustrated by the confines of the campus; Frederica longs for a little bit of excitement and turmoil. She certainly doesn't get that from her parents, who are kind and loving people, but occasionally too busy with campus politics -- they are chief organizers of the faculty union, which makes them the campus radicals in 1978 -- to pay as much attention to Frederica as she would like.
Excitement finally comes to Frederica's life in the form of Laura Lee French, the new housemother at the neighboring dorm. Laura Lee is glamorous, flamboyant, and free-spirited to a fault. She also turns out to be a distant cousin to the Hatches, with a connection to Frederica's parents that she never could have expected.
As always, Lipman's writing is elegant and entertaining, and her characters are lively and entirely believable. Her plotting falls a bit short this time, I think; the resolution is a bit of a deus ex machina, and the final chapter zips through thirty years -- bringing the characters to the present day -- rather hastily and artlessly.
Second-rate Lipman is better than a lot of what's out there, and My Latest Grievance is a pleasantly diverting book, but if you haven't read her before, there are better places to start; I'd suggest The Inn at Lake Devine or The Ladies' Man.
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