Book Reviews
I loved every page of this very funny, insightful, sophisticated yet good-natured book, but it took me a while to realize that it was a sex farce.... The Ladies' Man never suggests that all men are like Nash Harvey.... This book isn't even angry with its villain; it just shakes its head in amused amazement and, a little wiser, walks away.
Anita Gates - New York Times
The Dobbin sisters are not the Bennetts, and Harvey Nash is no Mr. Darcy, but Lipman's latest novel is Pride and Prejudice as it plays out in the bicoastal, aging-boomer '90s. The protagonists are three red-haired siblings and the man who dumped one of them at her 1967 engagement party are all in their 40s and 50s. Almost chaste and largely celibate, the Dobbins live together spinsterishly in a Boston suburb, until the womanizing cad who now calls himself Nash Harvey flies in from L.A. "on a mission...to apologize." Unforgiving Adele, the oldest and the one he dumped, works stoically in public TVAin marked contrast to Harvey's precarious livelihood writing commercial jingles. Difficult middle sister Lois, divorced from a cross-dressing patent attorney, for decades has believed mistakenly that the smoothly smarmy Harvey left town because of his feelings for her. She welcomes him back with barely concealed lust. The youngest, Kathleen, reacts angrily to his predatory insinuations, breaking a casserole dish on his head and inadvertently turning Nash into an unwelcome houseguest. Paths cross in sitcom fashion, especially since Cynthia John, Harvey's pickup on the red-eye from L.A., lives in the building that houses Kathleen's lingerie shop. The situation is provocative and promising, and at first Lipman seems poised to deliver a semiwhimsical search for identity a la Ann Tyler. She exhibits a gimlet eye for the nuances of social interaction and for the rituals of courtship both East and West Coast style, and as usual, her view of the battle of the sexes is frank and refreshing. But the narrative soon begins to read like the outline of a screenplay. Done in shots and heavy on (admittedly snappy) dialogue, it sacrifices depth of character and story for glib entertainment. Though certain scenes (Adele's perfunctory deflowering; the car crash in which Harvey's ex meets a New York playwright on the make) are witty and engaging, too many other encounters (Harvey's sojourn in the Dobbins' apartment; a cocktail party/jingle recital) are dictated less by credibility than by the need to be cute. It's satisfying that while Harvey faces his comeuppance and a palimony suit, the Dobbin sisters finally confront love and commitment. In the end, however, this book is more superficial than we have come to expect of Lipman's fiction.
Publishers Weekly
The Ladies' Man is three things: the title of Lipman's newest book; a description of the main male character, Nash Harvey; and the book's weakness. The basic premise of the book is that Nash Harvey, or Harvey Nash, has a crisis of conscience over an engagement he walked out on 30 years ago. He returns to Boston to see Adele Dobbin, his spurned fiance. Nash's visit teaches Adele and her two unmarried sisters a new lesson "about dignity being less important than love." Nash is a shallow smooth talker, seemingly addicted to lust and unfamiliar with love. The difficulty with the novel is that while Lipman (The Inn at Lake Devine, LJ 2/1/98) characterizes Nash so well, in doing so she creates a central character who is most unsympathetic. Furthermore, Lipman has Nash cut a romantic swath through the lives of other women during the course of the novel, creating a large cast of female characters, none of whom are fully developed. A book of moderate appeal. —Caroline M. Hallsworth, Cambrian Coll., Sudbury, Ont.
Library Journal
A romantic comedy of errors by the novelist whose previous labors in this vineyard (Isabel's Bed, 1995, etc.) have established her as a master hand. Harvey Nash is the sort of fellow your mother warned you about. Genial, good-hearted, and sincere, he genuinely likes the company of women and is attentive to their moods and concerns. All the worse for the women who fall for him, then, since he's an incorrigible bachelor who can't commit himself—almost literally—on pain of law. Harvey left his native Boston quite abruptly on the evening of March 11, 1967—and it's no coincidence that that was the night his engagement to Adele Dobbin was to have been announced at a big party at the Copley Plaza. When he stopped running, Harvey found himself in California, where he settled in Los Angeles (as "Nash Harvey") and established a successful career in advertising. Almost 30 years later, he has a live-in girlfriend, Dina, who wants (very badly) to settle down and get pregnant. But, again, Harvey just can't see his way clear. So now he reverses course and heads back to Boston to look up Adele—but not before hooking up with Cynthia John, a sharp-eyed investor who sits next to him on the plane. In Boston, Adele is still unmarried and lives in a kind of bitch-goddess convent with Lois and Kathleen, her equally unattached sisters. She's understandably less than thrilled to find Harvey on her doorstep, but Lois (who always had a thing for him) tries to welcome him back into the fold. Meanwhile, Dina is cruising beaches and coffee-bars in search of an (unwitting) semen donor, and Harvey and Cynthia are having some drama of their own. The course of true love is seldom a straight line, true enough. But can it be a series of overlapping circles? Funny, dumb, good-natured, predictable, and slick: Lipman knows what she wants to do and does it very well.
Kirkus Reviews