Shelter in Place
David Leavitt
Rated: 3.20 of 5 stars
3.20
· 10 ratings · 384 pages · Published: 02 Jul 2020
Shelter in Place is a novel about house and home, furniture and rooms, safety and freedom and the invidious ways in which political upheaval can undermine even the most seemingly impregnable foundations. Eva is the novel's polestar, a woman who moves through her days accompanied by a roving, carefully curated salon. She's a generous hostess and more than a bit of a control freak, whose obsession with decorating allows Leavitt to treat us to a slyly comic look at the habitués and fetishes of the so-called shelter industry. Yet when, in her avidity to secure shelter for herself, she persuades Bruce to buy a grand if dilapidated apartment in Venice, she unwittingly sets off the chain of events that will propel him, for the first time, to venture outside the bubble and embark on a wholly unexpected love affair.
A comic portrait of the months immediately following the 2016 election, Shelter in Place is also a meditation on the unreliable appetites-for love, for power, for freedom-by which both our public and private lives are shaped.
Tagged as:
- literary fiction 3
- city/urban 3
- contemporary 3
- political 3
- lgbtq+ 2
- funny 2
- satire 2
- comedy 2
- family 2
- friendship 1
- historical fiction 1
- Add topics
- format - reader age
- book 1
- adult fiction 1