Janie Ligon's Revenge
It's 1995. The internet is about to transform society. Janie Ligon seeks a similar career transformation now that she is Levi Strauss's General Manager for the United Kingdom. She never anticipates the distraction caused by her perfect husband of twenty-four years suddenly seeking a divorce. Janie refuses to become either a punch line or the stereotype of the middle-aged woman replaced by the trophy wife. When she cannot convince Samuel to stay, she believes his betrayal justifies her revenge. Meanwhile, Samuel believes he is experiencing true love for the first time in his life.
Excerpts from Indie Reader ReviewWith all the hallmarks of a Martin Amis novel, this is a smart, elegant, pleasant read about smart and elegant people doing unpleasant things. Fascinated with the personal will to power, Levin populates this riveting, ugly novel with high-flyers concerned only with how to get what they want and with scant regard for the human wreckage left in their wakes as they do so. Nor do the parallels with Amis end with the novel's characters. Levin has a deep and abiding interest in transatlantic culture, moving with ease from America to the United Kingdom. And, like Amis, his principal interest is in that milieu as it was lived in the dwindling years of the twentieth century - a time, as he notes, without IMs and Twitter. There is lots of sex - though Levin has the good sense not to get too agricultural in his descriptions - and much playing of hardball, both by the betrayers and the betrayed. Samuel, who resists for only so long an illicit dalliance with a woman he meets through an ad in the long-running London satirical magazine Private Eye (Levin knows exactly how this works; the ad is word-perfect), is the archetype of a person who married young before working out exactly what they wanted from life. His wife Janie is (at the outset, in any case) also an object of sympathy. Not averse to her own extramarital affairs (with a woman whose tongue, we are informed, is altogether more skilled than Samuel's), she is trapped as well, which becomes clear as the novel develops - specifically by societal expectations of women in business and the ingrained nature of the role she comes to inhabit in that sphere. Then comes the divorce itself, the machinations of which occupy the entire second half of the novel, the whole woven into a rich and detailed world of fast cars and private schools.
Excerpts from Book Life Review
This brisk novel of divorce and vengeance finds Janie Ligon, an American executive working in the UK, facing the end of her marriage and finding herself consumed, at the start of a tricky divorce, by anger and a desire for retribution against Samuel, her husband of 24 years.
Levin sets this story of a woman scorned in the mind 1990s, the dawn of the digital era, when "E-mail was a novelty few used, at least in England." Samuel's correspondence with Alison is old-school, letters in which the pair address each other with real yearning. Chapters from Janie's perspective pulse with justified bitterness, creating a tense, engaging contrast that powers the plot. Deep concerns of reputation, deftly captured by Levin, motivate both leads throughout, which makes the muted reaction to the breakup from daughter Hannah a telling, relatable detail. Despite the title and the power of Janie's anger, the letters and the love story overshadow the story's most compelling element: Janie's rage at betrayal. Takeaway: Human story of love, betrayal and retribution, at the dawn of the digital era.Customer Reviews
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