An Abandoned Wife and Mother Learns to Cope

Something has happened to Elizabeth Berg since her fine debut novel, “Durable Goods,” told the story of a girl’s escape from her abusive father, an Army officer at a dusty Southwestern base. Berg has gained confidence and technical skill, but she has also become popular, with novels such as “Range of Motion,” “The Pull of the Moon” and “What We Keep.” She has learned--a double-edged kind of knowledge--how to reliably please her fans.

Her eighth novel, “Open House,” is the story of 42-year-old Samantha Morrow, whose husband, David, has just left her. Samantha adds up her liabilities: “Gray hair is popping out all over my head, I have become intimately acquainted with cellulite, and just last week, I awakened to hear myself snoring.” She has an 11-year-old son, Travis, to raise and mortgage payments to meet, and she hasn’t worked since college, when she sang in a rock band.

Samantha swoops through a predictable Magic Mountain ride of emotions--shopping mania, anguish, rage, relief--and discovers that the predictability doesn’t make the ups and downs any less wrenching. To supplement her income from temp jobs, she rents out rooms in her house. Her first boarder, Lydia, who is 80, asks her: “Did you think life would be easy all the time?”

Samantha denies it. “I just didn’t know how weak I was.”

“Well. That’s where you’re wrong,” Lydia assures her. “You’ll see.”

One thing Samantha has plenty of is advice. Travis thinks she’s going crazy. Her mother fixes her up with dates. Her best woman friend tells her she’s well rid of David, confirming Samantha’s own feeling that “it was a nervous love, even at the start; and there was a certain holding back on his part that seemed mean-spirited.” And then there’s King.

King is not a dog. He’s a good-looking-if-he-weren’t-so-fat man who introduces Samantha to the temp world. He has a degree from MIT in astrophysics but would rather walk poodles or hawk cheese samples in supermarkets. Reason: Actually working in a scientific specialty would keep him from appreciating the big picture. King is warm and helpful and remarkably unbitter about having been a sexual reject all his life. Thanks to him, Samantha learns how to run a coin laundry and nail headers at construction sites. And she’s reminded that not every man has to be a rat.

King is fun, but he isn’t believable--at least not in the same way Travis is believable. King belongs to the part of the novel that also includes the $12,000 swath Samantha cuts through Tiffany’s with David’s credit cards, her mother’s insufferable cheerfulness (which hides, Samantha comes to realize, the decades-old pain of widowhood), a phone call from Martha Stewart that just might be real, the best friend’s New Age bromides, the parade of boarders, Samantha’s aborted rock ‘n’ roll career and the snappy interior dialogue. They all give a simple story with moments of hard-earned wisdom a sitcom gloss.

“Durable Goods” (another simple story) had nothing sitcommy about it. Is the added fun in “Open House” worth the cheapening effect? Probably not--though it isn’t as if Berg, at her best, has lost her touch. When David belatedly asks her to take him back, Samantha asks him what he missed about her, and he can come up only with generalities: “The way you’re always there for me. The way you never question me or give me a hard time.” Not, she thinks, the way your shoes are always untied. The way you cry over greeting cards. The way you try to hide your cowlick. The freckle at the side of your right breast. If he’d remembered things like that, he might have had a chance.