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I just finished reading "Fear and Yoga in New Jersey" and I have to admit I really enjoyed it.

Here's a review I found out there about the book

Galant, Debra.
Fear and Yoga in New Jersey.
St. Martin's. Mar. 2008.
c.272p. ISBN 978-0-312-36725-1.
$23.95.

Nina is a self-employed yoga instructor in an affluent part of Essex County, NJ. She caters to the blond wives of rich Manhattan businessmen and is secretly ashamed of her Long Island upbringing as a Jewish American Princess. Now she's a Unitarian, pleased with her own open-mindedness and environmental outlook. "She drove a Prius, recycled religiously, eschewed synthetics, shopped organic, drank bottled water and bought all her stationery from third-world countries." When her husband loses his job as a weather forecaster at the airport, Nina's planets go out of alignment and all sorts of bad karma comes her way: a yoga student falls and threatens to sue, a hurricane in Florida scares her meddling mother into a surprise visit, and her son starts acting strangely after attending a rich classmate's bat mitzvah. Galant, whose first novel, Rattled, proved that she had a talent for zany suburban social satire, strikes again. This time her characters are slightly more sympathetic, if pathetic, but the action is madcap and nonstop. Recommended for all public libraries.- Christine Perkins, Burlington P.L, WA.

"Fear and Yoga in New Jersey" (St. Martin's Press)

By Debra Galant

Like her first novel, "Rattled," Debra Galant's new book is a comedy of modern life in a New Jersey suburb. And it starts out, anyway, with promise.

Nina is a yoga teacher whose studied calm on the job masks an increasingly out-of-control domestic life. Her normally sober-minded husband is laid off work in an outsourcing, and proceeds to blunder into misadventures with a hard-nosed Homeland Security agent and a lap-dancer named Xenon. Nina's son, seduced by attending an opulent bat mitzvah, decides he wants a bar mitzvah, taking advantage of the Jewish roots Nina had rejected in favour of Unitarianism. And Nina's parents, including her overbearing and suspicious mother, drop in for a visit.

The story unfolds in a series of scenes that rotate among the main characters. It gets off to a promising start with some funny situations and good one-liners.

A beginning yoga student, meekly entering a class during quiet time, adopts "an exaggerated pretence of civility, or else her interpretation of Marcel Marceau imitating a burglar." A wealthy high school student who bought a souped-up iPod with her ton of bat mitzvah money passes on her old one to a friend "like it was a half-eaten tuna sandwich." A rabbi bears "a full beard with the texture of a Brillo pad."

Just as enticing are Galant's takes on suburban life, such as her descriptions of the women in Nina's yoga classes. And the author deftly portrays the petty resentments that build up between spouses.

As Nina's life unravels, it looks like the story is headed toward an inventive, screwball climax. But then, somehow, the fizz goes flat. Instead, toward the end of the book, loose ends are tied up in a way that is, well, workmanlike.

Nonetheless, it's a breezy read, a beach book. If that's what you're after, this will do the trick.

Copyright © 2008 The Canadian Press.

Read the first chapter here

 

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