The Mr. and Mrs. Club

Every morning Liza and two-year-old Abby wave goodbye to Julius as he sets off on a long commute to his office at the best law firm in Boston. Liza learns how to hang wallpaper, shops at the Atomic Super Market, and listens to Elvis Presley in secret. It is 1957. Liza and Julius have moved to an old house in Rock Hill, a small New England town that seems to Liza just too far from the urban university that had been the center of their student lives.She makes tuna casserole for the monthly potluck supper of the Mr. and Mrs. Club. The people they meet seem like a new breed to Liza: husbands manning their backyard grills in chef's hats and aprons with a picture on the front of a man in a chef's hat and apron; red-lipsticked wives knitting reindeer-patterned sweaters for their husbands during Town Meeting, and boasting about the forty quarts of corn they'd put into their freezers.An invitation to tennis at the biggest house in town begins a friendship with a new tribe, the Cliffords, owners of the granite quarry, Rock Hill's only major industry. One Clifford son, Derek, rebelling against a career in the family business, notices Liza and she, in turn, becomes increasingly aware of him.Rock Hill itself is changing. No longer a farming community, not yet a suburb, Liza feels isolated, lonely, and trapped by the expectations and constraints that typified the era. Ultimately, she must decide what she truly wants out of life.The Mr. and Mrs. Club is a story about a marriage and traditions: its conflicting goals and roles, jealousies, needs, desperations and desires. Alan Emmet evokes the comic and the poignant in a tale of clashing cultures that provides a fresh look at the 1950s. This description may be from another edition of this product.