Emma Straub is Literally The Best Thing Ever
THE VACATIONERS by Emma Straub
Getting this out there now: Emma Straub is one of my favorite writers right now, so really, I can’t do an “objective” review on her newest novel. I mean, the girl could have just written “TROLLLL” with L’s that filled it’s 300 pages and I still probably would have said “She’s a genius, you just don’t get it!” and found some way to highly recommend the book to all of you. She didn’t though, so as “objectively” as I possibly can say this: Go read The Vacationers right now.
I hate to confess, but I have yet to read Straub’s other books, Other People We Married and Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, (what am I doing with my life…), but I HAVE read the good majority of the stuff she’s written for Rookie. You aren’t reading Rookie yet? You need to. You think it’s for high-school girls? Well, um, yeah, but not only! Look, just, I wrote about it more here. Anyway, every single day during my lunch break, I go onto Rookie and read the day’s new stuff, and seriously – Emma Straub days are the BEST.
A shortlist of things the girl’s written about over there: (1) The Bachelor(ette); (2) That day when you have to change your tampon every 35 minutes (3) Feeling like a loser because you haven’t published a book by 25 (4) The amazingness of Kardashian memoirs (5) Binge watching TV shows… and I have to cut myself off somewhere, so here’s cool.
Emma Straub is like that older sister or maybe that really young still cool aunt that gives THE BEST advice in a way that’s not like a lecture, it’s just her telling her own story, sharing her own fuck-ups and hoping you won’t do them, but even if you do, hey, it’s cool. We’re human. Basically this: If it were the 90’s, Straub would be the John Stamos/Uncle Jesse of your family.
It’s not that The Vacationers expressively teaches; it’s just that, we see these characters fall into the clichés again, and it’s still, “look everyone – this never works.”
More about these characters, the Post family. There’s the patriarch, Jim, a man who really does love his wife, despite the fact he just ended a brief affair with an intern at his office. Now, he’s ‘retired’ from work and unsure whether or not to stay with a wife who may never forgive him. There’s the wife, Franny, a writer who thought the trip she’s planned to Mallorca would be a celebration of their 35 years, not a last hurrah. There’s Sylvia, their youngest, a girl’s who’s just escaped from the high school she hates and is desperate to learn about sex before going to college. There’s Bobby, their eldest, a boy who can’t seem to pick a path, and his girlfriend, the gym-rat Carmen whom no one really gets the draw of, besides like, how good she looks in yoga pants. And then there’s the adopted couple in the family, Franny’s best friend Charles and his partner Lawrence, who’ve just heard the news a young pregnant mother is considering them to be her infant’s adoptive parents.
All this is going on, plus more I’ve not mentioned because of the fun of reading the thing and all, and, as mentioned, the family is packing up and going to Mallorca for two weeks. You’ve seen The Shining and what happens when families that already have some issues lock themselves in together, right? TENSIONS BUILD.
Not like, to axe-murdering levels. But, to great fiction levels, for sure.
First of all, everything I’ve mentioned above? It’s a secret from somebody else in the family. Bobby’s got no idea the tension between his parents is because of an affair his father had with a girl hardly older than Sylvia. Jim and Franny know Bobby’s struggling to figure things out, but not to what extent. Carmen, I guess, knows no one really likes her. But don’t worry – everything comes out, and when and how it does is the meat of this story.
It’s a novel about mistakes, about new beginnings, about forgiveness and forging ahead. It’s a story about what it’s like to be in a real family, all with characters with their own shit and their own motives and their own sentient thoughts. It’s not a story about who wins, who’s right or wrong. It’s a story about learning to get over all that.
Seriously though – this is the novel you’re about to see everyone reading on the subway or at the airport. And it’s the novel you should follow suit and devour. Emma Straub 4ever.
