Emma Straub’s latest novel is the second book I’ve read in a row where a group of New Yorkers abandons the city for a warm-weather getaway. Julia Fierro’s Cutting Teeth and Emma Straub’s The Vacationers are telling us to get lost this summer and deal with the consequences, which is the inevitable result of vacationing with loved ones. Straub’s novel is being hailed as a beach read for the literary crowd—or, read between the lines—a beach book you won’t be embarrassed reading. And The Vacationers certainly fits the mold. An early summer release, a cerulean blue cover, and accessible prose, meets island homes, food snobs, and crumbling personal relationships. Need I say more?
The Post family has chosen Mallorca for its two-week vacation, and along with their bathing suits and sunscreen they’ve packed drama. “There were things that Jim would have taken out of his bags, if it had been possible: the last year of his life, and the five before that… the way Franny looked at him across the dinner table at night.” And so we meet Jim Post, the family patriarch. A recently retired magazine editor, Jim is coping with the pressures of finding purpose after a lifetime of work, or as Straub puts it: “the emptiness waiting on the other side of the return flight, the blank days he would have to fill and fill and fill.” His retirement was offered as a professional courtesy, and thus feelings of uselessness aren’t his only emotional baggage.
It comes as no surprise, then, that Jim’s wife Franny is also reacting to the retirement. The incident trickles from family member to family member, affecting characters in various ways. Franny initiated the vacation so she could spend time with her nearly off-to-college daughter, Sylvia, but she is distracted by her anger toward Jim. To make the trip more palatable, she invites her best friend Charles and his husband Lawrence, who agree to the vacation as a welcome distraction from the process of adopting a baby. Bobby, the Post’s oldest child, works as a real estate agent in Miami and is trying to maintain the façade of a successful career. His older, forty-something girlfriend Carmen—or as Jim likes to say, Bobby’s “albatross of a girlfriend”—is also in tow, and the least-liked vacationer among the Posts:
Carmen gave a half-smile and continued to paw through a rack of sequined tops. “Oh, you know, museums aren’t really my thing.”
“Well, it’s not really a museum, it’s just a house. Where a writer lived…”
“I don’t read that much.”
Franny smiled with her lips closed, a tight line. This was a grown woman, she remaindered herself, a person who supported herself and made her own decisions. This was not her family. This was not her problem. “Mm-hmm.”
Franny isn’t alone in her snobbery. Almost everyone in the novel disapproves of Carmen’s lowbrow affect and career as a physical trainer. She doesn’t care about art, or value the Posts intellectually, and therefore she is treated as a philistine. Straub cleverly pits the family’s snobbish attitudes toward Carmen against Bobby’s poor treatment of his girlfriend, which raises the question: what good is an intellect if you have a skewed moral compass?
While morals come under scrutiny—questions about fidelity and honesty, primarily—Straub examines the notion of family most of all. Franny and Jim’s disappointment in Bobby—his decisions to live in Miami and date Carmen—are paralleled by the impending baby Charles and Lawrence will adopt if they’re selected by the birthmother. There is a cloud of “you can’t choose your family” hanging over the characters in this book, displaying the complications that people you love bring into your life, in beautiful measure.
As the sun sets on the Posts’ time in Mallorca, Straub tucks the reader in with feel-good sentiments. It’s nice to read a light novel that also tackles serious themes, a novel where character concerns are wrapped up cleanly. (The claustrophobic pitch at the end of the book is more cathartic than damaging.) There is a nagging feeling, however, that The Vacationers is merely a portrait of average trials and tribulations. The characters are dealing with fairly tepid life issues: virginity, fidelity, unlikeable girlfriends. Even the debt threatening a major character feels emotionally padded. Straub is a generous writer, and on the sentence level she is magnificent. Fans of her work will find the same readability she brought to Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, as her books are certainly page-turners. And while her prose is funny, charming, witty, and poignant, at times the Post family feels too remote.
I do think The Vacationers will continue to show up in beach bags again and again. It’s entertaining in the same way as Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Emma Donoghue’s Room—family dramas that packed a punch. Straub’s subject matter is easier to digest, and the Posts are relatable because they are real. At one point Straub writes: “Families were nothing more than hope cast out in a wide net, everyone wanting only the best.” Enjoy this takeaway when you’re stuck with your own loved ones this summer. Not many of us will be vacationing to picturesque Mediterranean islands, but we will be stuck on camping trips, attending barbeques and enduring weddings. The Vacationers is the perfect book to distract you from the drama. Something about knowing you’re not alone eases the pain.
