A Perfect Arrangement Suzanne Berne Paperback $13.00 Read more...

INTRODUCTION

Mirella and Howard Cook-Goldman have it all-two beautiful children, the home of their dreams, successful careers, even a golden retriever. The only thing they lack is reliable childcare. After weeks of searching and interviewing, they are sent Randi Gill by a respected child-care placement agency and all their problems are solved. Randi is the nanny they always wanted. She sews, cooks, cleans, and quickly bonds with the children. In fact, she's almost too perfect. As Randi's attachment to the children grows, Mirella and Howard begin to have misgivings about her and tension builds in their once happy home.

Suddenly Mirella and Howard's marriage begins to unravel as each is forced to reveal secrets they have been keeping hidden. Randi's situation becomes more and more precarious and, sensing her place beginning to slip, she works harder to bond with the children, placing herself in a powerful position within the fragile household. As a result, Mirella and Howard face the greatest doubts and fears that haunt working parents as they struggle to balance family and professional life.

ABOUT SUZANNE BERNE

Suzanne Berne's first novel, A Crime in the Neighborhood, won Great Britain's Orange Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book, as well as a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times and Edgar Allan Poe first fiction awards. She has published fiction and essays in numerous magazines and been a frequent contributor to The New York Times. She lives with her husband and two daughters outside of Boston.

Praise

Praise for A Perfect Arrangement

"Haunting...Takes you deep into perhaps the least-traveled territory of all: the complex motives behind everyday human behavior."—Harper's Bazaar

"Compelling and disturbingly familiar...Berne has a talent for drawing page-turning suspense out of common situations, and her novel is all the more haunting because its dangers are so banal...It's hard not to be drawn it."—The Boston Globe

"Berne nails the messy domesticity that resides where Martha Stuart fears to tread." —People

"Berne uses familiar circumstances to explore treacheries, big and small, that invade family relationships...[She] shows enormous intelligence about expectations, and what people hide from themselves and palm off on each other."—The Washington Post

AUTHOR INTERVIEW

The ending of A Perfect Arrangement is somewhat ambiguous. How do you view this future of this family? Do you think they can be happy or have they done too much damage to each other?

To be honest, I haven't really thought much about these characters' lives beyond what happens to them in the novel. I do believe, however, that people who are able to look frankly at their lives and at the compromises and mistakes they've made, and who aren't crushed by doing so, have a good chance of making better choices for themselves in the future. In that way, both Mirella and Howard are different beings than who they were at the novel's beginning. They are less attached to appearances and to received ideas of what families should look like, and more aware of the preciousness of time and the provisional nature of life. The last chapter has them at a crossroads: they can either decide to be a troubled family—and probably fall apart—or try to be a family with some problems, which is quite a distinction. I guess I'd like to think they'll make a run for the latter.

You address the problem of what has been called "jealous mommy syndrome", when a mother becomes envious of the relationship her children are having with their nanny. In the end, A Perfect Arrangement seems to speak against having a live-in nanny who takes on most of the mothering roles. What are your thoughts on this?

I'm definitely not speaking against live-in nannies. Working couples today lead extremely complex and demanding lives and they need help in raising their children. Nannies have been around for a long time and most of them are reliable, competent and caring people who perform an essential service.

The problem lies in our expectations of ourselves vis-à-vis work and family. A certain amount of domestic and emotional chaos is inevitable when you are trying to meet the demands of career and family—but I don't think that most people expect that. They expect to have it all work smoothly, sensibly, and sometimes they become very disillusioned when it doesn't. Currently, there is very little support in the professional world for people with young children. There aren't any guidelines either. So, working couples have to make it up as they go along, finding solutions and making making mistakes as they search for ways to balance their need to have jobs and their need to have a family. I don't think having one should cancel out the other. But people must be realistic about the fact that having both is hard and requires all sorts of compromises, some of which you just can't anticipate.

As for "jealous mommy syndrome," I suppose that best way to cope with envy toward a childcare provider is to admit it, discuss it honestly with the provider and, if necessary, change the arrangements. In the book, Mirella ignores what's going on at home until she's literally stuck in the middle of it—and by then things have gotten quite out of hand.

Which genre did you work in first, fiction or essay? How did you find the transition? Now, as an author of both, do you find it difficult to go back and forth? Does working in one genre inspire the other?

I began writing fiction in college and published my first story when I was a senior. Then I graduated, and my first job (besides waitressing) was at a small weekly newspaper. So, by necessity I made the transition from writing fiction to nonfiction pretty quickly—especially as my first job at that newspaper was writing up the classified ads. Later on I began writing book reviews and personal essays.

What the book reviews in particular taught me was how to structure an argument, something that has proved invaluable to me as a fiction writer. There's always an argument running through a good piece of fiction, I discovered, but it has to be implicit rather than explicit. Going back and forth between essays and fiction keeps me aware of the essential demands of argument. In my view, these demands are: introduce a problem; establish a context within which to understand that problem; then engage the reader by surprising him, by foiling his expectations, by telling him something he thought he knew in a way that persuades him to look at it quite differently.

How did winning the Orange Prize for A Crime in the Neighborhood influence your writing of A Perfect Arrangement? Was there more pressure in writing the second book then the first, or vice versa?

I had already written a first draft of A Perfect Arrangement by the time I won the Orange Prize, so I didn't really feel more pressure than I was already putting on myself. Winning a prize is always gratifying, and I certainly appreciated the boost in confidence it gave me.

How much of your life experience do you put into your fiction? How much are the characters in A Perfect Arrangement based on your life?

The answer is both none and everything. I do not use incidents or situations from my own life in my novels, nor do I base my character on people I know. On the other hand, everything in those novels comes from my perception of the world I live in.

What are you working on now? Can we expect more fiction soon?

I am just finishing a collection of short stories and I'm also working on another novel. So, with any luck two new books within the next few years.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Discuss the Robert Louis Stevenson poem at the beginning of the book. What do you think Berne is saying by introducing this story with this particular poem? What purpose does it serve? Do you think it is effective?
   

2. When Howard first thinks of his time with Nadine he thinks "it was hardly an affair; they'd slept together only a few times." In what other ways does Howard justify the affair? Why do you think he has the affair to begin with? Discuss the ways this affair comes back to haunt him.
   

3. Compare Jacob and Pearl. They are very different children, but what about them is the same? What about Jacob appeals to Howard? Jacob's needs are addressed often, but Pearl's seem to come second. What kinds of problems is she dealing with and why do they seem less urgent to the family than Jacob's issues?
   

4. "Jacob had been Howard's favorite figure in the Bible, canny and quick, so determined." Discuss this statement in relation to how Jacob actually is. Do you think Howard is disappointed or accepting of Jacob?
   

5. When did you first suspect that Randi might not be so wonderful after all? Why does she lie about the death of her parents? What is she trying to get from the Cook-Goldman family? Despite her initial lie, did you see her necessarily as a sinister character? How did your opinion of her change throughout the novel?
   

6. Why does Mirella keep her pregnancy a secret for so long? What is she really afraid of? How do you see her keeping the secret as a symptom of larger problems in the Cook-Goldman's relationship? What are their other problems and to what lengths do they go to on order to ignore them?
   

7. There are many mother-daughter relationships represented in this book. Mirella is working to get along with Pearl as well as her own mother. Vivvy's relationship with her mother and then, later, her daughter is also described. Compare these relationships. How do they change throughout the course of the story? Which grown stronger and which weaker?
   

8. In what ways is Randi a savior to the Cook-Goldman family? What voids does she fill for Mirella? For Howard? For the children?
   

9. Why does Mirella tell Randi she is pregnant before she tells Howard? How does this confiding in Randi change the power dynamic in the household? How does it change again when Howard's affair is revealed?
   

10. What about Jacob is attractive to Randi? Why does she favor him over Pearl? Do you think that, given the chance, Randi would have run off with Jacob?
    

11. The Guptas who live across the street appear in almost every chapter, and their role grows as the narrative progresses. Why are they so important to the story? How do you compare them to the Cook-Goldmans? Do they seem like a more put together family? How and why?
    

12. Mirella is working on the custody battle of Jerry Vassbacher throughout the course of the novel. What is the significance of this case? How does Mirella relate to it and why is it so important to her? Why is it that in her greatest moments of stress she pictures Jerry Vassbacher and his children?
    

13. Randi enjoys teaching Pearl and Jacob everything from how to make dolls to things about nature. What then is the significance of the birth of the baby birds and then subsequent ravaging of the nest and the deaths of the chicks? How does this relate to the death of Martha a short while later?
    

14. When a telephone caller asks Randi if she is the babysitter, she lies and says she is Howard's niece. Why does she do this? How does Randi compare with Howard's actual niece, Danielle, who visits with Vivvy and Richard?
    

15. In the end, Howard does not get to build his housing development on the old farm land and is humiliated by Nadine. What are the good and bad effects of his failure? Also, what are the good and bad effects of Mirella's troubled and, in the end, failed pregnancy?
    

16. In the end, Mirella and Pearl are in the garden together, sharing what is perhaps their only peaceful moment in the book. Do you think that the Goldman-Cook family has actually recovered from their stint with Randi? How has the experience changed them and their priorities? What, in the last chapter, points towards the possibility of their future happiness?