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From Center for Fiction First Novel Prize finalist Bethany Ball comes a biting and darkly funny new novel that follows a set of privileged, jaded Connecticut suburbanites whose cozy, seemingly picture-perfect, lives begin to unravel amid shocking turns of fate and revelations of long-held secrets.

Welcome to small-town Connecticut, a place whose inhabitants seem to have it all -- the status, the homes, the money, and the ennui. There's Tripp and Virginia, beloved hosts whom the community idolizes, whose basement hides among other things a secret stash of guns and a drastic plan to survive the end times. There's Gunter and Rachel, recent transplants who left New York City to raise their children, only to feel both imprisoned by the banality of suburbia. And Richard and Margot, community veterans whose extramarital affairs and battles with mental health are disguised by their enviably polished veneers and perfect children. At the center of it all is the Petra School, the most coveted of all the private schools in the state, a supposed utopia of mindfulness and creativity, with a history as murky and suspect as our character's inner worlds.

With deep wit and delicious incisiveness, in The Pessimists, Bethany Ball peels back the veneer of upper-class white suburbia to expose the destructive consequences of unchecked privilege and moral apathy in a world that is rapidly evolving without them. This is a superbly drawn portrait of a community, and its couples, torn apart by unmet desires, duplicity, hypocrisy, and dangerous levels of discontent.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bethany Ball was born in Detroit and has lived in Santa Fe, New Jersey, Miami, and Israel. She now lives in New York with her family. She is the author of What to Do About the Solomons.

REVIEWS

“Ball is a pleasure to read. Her sentences are brisk twists of the knife; every satirical dart is a bull’s-eye. She makes a meal out of her space-cadet suburbanites, with their expensive German cars and organic apple juice, but allows their concerns to be widely applicable: Will my children grow up to be OK? Will my life amount to anything? Does my spouse secretly loathe me? Should I be worried about this lump in my breast? Is the thrill of adultery powerful enough to outweigh the guilt of it? Suffering, Ball demonstrates, is universal, and fears are often irrational. Just because a rich guy has no reason to fear that he’ll run out of money doesn’t mean he won’t be consumed by the notion.” —Molly Young

“Three Married Couples and a Cryptic Headmistress Fuel the Suburban Satire of ‘The Pessimists’” By Molly Young, New York Times, Oct. 5, 2021

“Bethany Ball’s literary satire has all the drama of a domestic thriller. Following several messy families in one wealthy Connecticut town, The Pessimists revolves around parents’ relationships with each other, their children, and the prestigious academy that binds them all together.”—Bustle

“A stinging satire about the hollowness of the suburban dream… Withering in its barbed wit, Ball’s mordantly penetrating portrait of middle-class malaise teems with infidelity, inequity, mistrust, and disappointment.”—Booklist

“From Richard Ford to Edward Albee, Rick Moody to John Cheever, the American suburbs have always had a dark core underneath the façade of Levittown homes and perfectly manicured front lawns. Ball gives her own spin on the tribulations of suburban ennui in her aptly named new novel The Pessimists. Ball’s second novel is no mid-century rehash, however, because The Pessimists is very much a suburban gothic for our current American dystopia. The denizens of Connecticut’s Gold Coast include Virginia and Trip, the perfect couple, who secretly hoard a cache of basement weapons to survive the apocalypse, as well as the more conventionally despairing Richard and Margot whose trials only include infidelity and mental health crises. Both twistedly dark and wickedly funny, The Pessimists updates our narratives of suburban anguish for an age of American decline.”—The Millions

“The Pessimists is honest and hilarious— treating suburban angst, marriage, and private school life both seriously and with the humor they’re due. Ball writes with the sharpened pen of writers like Meg Wolitzer and Taffy Brodesser-Akner, but with a dangerous edge and a pathos all her own.”—Rebecca Makkai, Pulitzer Prize Finalist for The Great Believers 

“As a portrait of a wealthy suburban community and the secret weirdos who inhabit it, this novel was perfection. From the private school where the kids aren’t actually learning anything to the dad stockpiling arms for the end of the world, I was with this story. There’s plenty of satire here, for sure, but I also genuinely rooted for these people’s private worries and hopes, the humanity that was still there under so much nonsense.”—Mary Beth Keane, author of Ask Again, Yes

“The Pessimists is a sweet-and-sour gimlet of a novel. It goes down easy, with a satirical edge and a knock-out punch. With raw honesty and sympathy, Bethany Ball exposes the foibles, follies, and discomforts of her comfortable suburban characters, shedding light into the dark corners of their inner lives. I’ve never seen a writer capture the ambush of middle age so well, with such blunt truth and knife-sharp humor. She details the troubles that come for people whose habitual striving has lost purpose—the disappointments small and large, the widening perforations of marriage and family, the disillusionment and indecision, the simmering discontentment—but also the sparks of joy, the salve of love, and the surprising shoots of growth. She is so good, and The Pessimists is terrific.”—Lauren Acampora, author of The Paper Wasp 

“In spare, headlong prose that hums with erotic possibility, The Pessimists cozies up to three jaded suburban couples, desperate to return to simpler times. At its center, a private school that oozes the most horrifying impulses of whiteness and privilege. Ball’s singular, indelible voice is reminiscent of Joan Didion: probing, wise, and deeply human.”—Jonathan Vatner, author of Carnegie Hill

“I read The Pessimists in one sitting, ignoring my phone and my family until I’d reached the final page. Bethany Ball is a writer of singular power, urgency, and humor, a master chronicler of middleclass ennui in the vein of Tom Perrotta and Meg Wolitzer. I loved this book.”—Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year