Debra Galant has a real gift for social satire. In "Fear and Yoga in New Jersey," her second novel after the very funny "Rattled," Galant again skewers suburbia. Yoga teacher Nina Gettleman-Summer - Unitarian, vegetarian, "good citizen of Mother Earth" - takes antidepressants, resents her affluent students, and worries that she's a fake, "not the Prius-driving, aluminum-recycling vegetarian she really was, but a forty-six-year-old Jewish American Princess." Nina is not having a good day. At approximately the same time her new tranquillity fountain floods her yoga studio, her husband, Michael, is laid off, his job as a meteorologist outsourced to the Philippines. Nina's parents, Belle and Max, fly north separately to escape a Florida hurricane. The ornery Belle arrives safely at the Gettleman-Summer residence, reeking of marijuana thanks to a Rastafarian cab driver. But Max ends up at Logan Airport with no luggage, no wallet, no ID. He's mistaken for a homeless person and taken into custody. Michael, studying cloud formations in the Newark Airport parking lot, comes under Homeland Security surveillance. The Gettleman-Summers' problems keep piling up, a string of madcap troubles, hilariously described, that may make readers forget that this novel doesn't have much of a plot.
(Mother's Day roundup, May 11, 2008)
