The perennial theme of marital infidelity is given a brisk, insightful, and sophisticated turn in Pierpont's impressive debut. When their father's emails to his former mistress are inadvertently discovered by siblings Kay Shanley, 11, and Simon, 15, the result is the unraveling of the family. Their father, Jack Shanley, is a well-known conceptual artist and self-indulgent seducer, and he sees his career go downhill due to a variety of circumstances. Deb, his wife, carries guilt from having broken up Jack's first marriage, only to realize that he's an inveterate womanizer who feels his indiscretions should be forgiven. Pierpont's keen observational gaze illuminates a strata of Manhattan society in which money and privilege abide alongside the gritty, drug-and-alcohol-fueled margins of social behavior. She is also particularly adept at portraying alienation in the young (Kay starts writing dirty Seinfeld fan fiction in a notebook; Simon reads The Fountainhead because he knows his mother doesn't want him to) and the parents' awkward attempts to communicate with their self-protective children. Her sense of humor surfaces, especially in a scene at a gallery opening, when Jack's carefully planned and shocking installation goes awry. Pierpont throws an audacious twist midway through the book, giving the slow, painful denouement a heartbreaking inevitability. This novel leaves an indelible portrait of lives blown off course by bad choices, loss of trust, and an essential inability to communicate. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

IN SOME CASES, the key to the success of a longstanding marriage may not be in its well-kept secrets but in its tacit agreements. Many a promiscuous spouse has been allowed room to roam as long as his or her dalliances aren't flaunted. I remember reading an interview with Magic Johnson's wife, Cookie, in this very newspaper in May 1996, five years after he was told he had been infected with H.I.V. When she came to Los Angeles to visit, "he always respected me," she said. "It's not that I thought he was a saint. But I didn't know what was happening, and I preferred it that way." If a marriage is sufficiently loving (as the Johnsons' apparently still is) or satisfying or economically advantageous, maybe it isn't worth blowing up if the person being betrayed is given the opportunity to turn a blind eye. Six months before the main action in Julia Pierpont's first novel, "Among the Ten Thousand Things," begins, an affluent Upper West Sider named Deb Shanley still has the option of moving past her husband's affair because the toxic information has been contained; no one in her world, aside from her mother, knows about his transgression. Slick, charming and tragicomically self-centered 55-year-old Jack was quick on his feet when Deb overheard him talking on the phone to his much younger girlfriend, while locked in a bathroom like a teenager at his mother's house in Houston, where he'd taken his family for an obligatory, pleasureless Christmas. Pierpont deftly describes Jack's state of mind and oily strategies as he manipulates Deb: "Thank God she'd found him out, to shepherd him from all he had already come to regret. He'd been on a wild horse, and she'd lassoed him in. Thank you, Deb, for saving us." He breaks the liaison off right then, and Deb's lawyer tells her to wait before taking any action. "You'd not believe ... what people get over," he remarks. So Deb sets her anger aside and the Shanleys' sex life gets surprisingly better. She and Jack are back on some sort of functioning marital hamster wheel when the spurned, lovesick girl prints out her graphic email correspondence with Jack and puts it in a cardboard box with a letter addressed to Deb, dropping it off at their apartment building. "For Mommy," the doorman says, handing the package to Deb's fragile 11-year-old daughter, Kay, thus popping the bubble of containment. In a shattering moment, Kay mistakenly thinks the box might hold a gift meant for her. Cruelly disabused of that notion, she shares the box and its hot contents with her 15-year-old brother, Simon, who immediately gives it to their mother. With her kids' eyes now upon her, Deb is forced to take action. The secret is out, tainting all. "She was the victim, yes, but in front of her children, she understood at once what else she would become, which was a guilty party." What follows is a novel about a family blown apart and yet still painfully tethered together, written by a blazingly talented young author whose prose is so assured and whose observations are so precise and deeply felt that it's almost an insult to bring up her age. At 28, Pierpont has a preternatural understanding of the vulnerabilities of middle age and the vicissitudes of a long marriage, the habits of being: "Jack liked to hammer a lot of thoughts out on the train. The hardest part of a marriage - of living with anyone - was those first 10 minutes after walking through the door. Questions about his work, his lunch, his trip home, which in his mind had barely ended, and answers to questions he'd not asked." During an argument about whether to stay together, Deb holds forth on the virtues of inertia and even ennui: "The point is I could, I could do the easy thing, or I could do the hard thing. I don't even know which would be harder. Divorce? Do you know what a nightmare? And I want to be married. I got married because I want to be married, Jack. Why did you?" Jack is an idiot and a narcissist, a semi-successful artist whose latest show is brought to an abrupt halt when one of the explosives he has used to create an installation injures a guest. An ambulance is called; the woman is clutching her arm and crying. But all Jack can say when he approaches her is, "What did you do?" Maturity-wise, 41-year-old Deb is a little better, but not much. She's a former dancer who embraced motherhood with another woman's husband - yes, she and Jack got together when he was married to someone else - using the pregnancy to nail her man and exit a failing career. Worse, she's fond of baby talk. (When she sees Kay eating waffles at a diner, she says, "Peanut? That looks yum.") Deb and Jack are parents out of a Noah Baumbach movie. But for all the Shanleys lack in the grown-up department, boy do I love their kids. Simon carries around a copy of "The Fountainhead," ostensibly because it bugs Deb, but also because he has, he's discovered, a lot in common with that novel's unscrupulous villain, Peter Keating - not because Simon is a conformist and a social climber but because of how they both feel about their mothers. (Simon finds himself quoting Keating in his head: "He wondered whether he really liked his mother.") And that Kay! She deals with the confusion caused by her parents' shenanigans by writing X-rated "Seinfeld" fan fiction in a notebook her friends steal on a school trip to the Museum of Natural History. These cruel, bullying philistines pore over Kay's work, not knowing that she's the real artist in her family, or that she doesn't exactly understand the language she herself employs when she writes. In one of Kay's "Seinfeld" scripts, Jerry and Elaine are married and George mistakenly receives a letter from a woman who's having an affair with Jerry. But when George tells Elaine all the dirty things the woman wants Jerry to do to her, Elaine just says "So?" It doesn't take much familiarity with Dr. Freud to understand that Kay is using her characters to act out her parents' baffling behavior (which to my mind makes Kay a born novelist). When her former friends shun Kay, calling her a pervert, her pain is excruciating. CONFESSION: I READ Pierpont's book twice. This shouldn't worry anyone looking for a luscious, smart summer novel - you don't have to do the same thing. But I wanted a greater understanding of an audacious structural move Pierpont executes about half of the way through, when she jumps ahead into the future, leaving no questions about the resolution of this story unanswered. It's an injection of omniscience reminiscent of Jennifer Egan or Milan Kundera, and it makes the unfolding of what follows more riveting in a slow-mo, rubbernecking way. It also reveals the now deeply explored characters as more tender than they appeared at first blush. In truth, the writing and the storytelling make the twists and turns of a marriage between such shallow characters more interesting than they have any right to be. Pierpont finally makes us care about these two wrinkled, aging babies who clearly want to stay married for selfish reasons. When Jack visits his elderly mother, he realizes, in a rare moment of clarity: "There is nothing I need that she can give me. Which is not the same as, There is nothing I need." In such heartbreakingly funny, albeit pathetic, moments, Pierpont illustrates how hard it can be to grow up, at any age - just one of the many reasons "Among the Ten Thousand Things" is such an impressive debut. 'You'd not believe what people get over,' a lawyer tells a wife who is considering divorce. HELEN SCHULMAN is at work on a new novel, "Come With Me."

When Jack Shanley's former girlfriend sends a box of sexually explicit emails to his wife, Deb, it is opened and read by their 11-year-old daughter, Kay, and 15-year-old son, -Simon, setting off a major marital disruption that hurts all family members. Jack, a successful New York artist, begs to be forgiven. Deb now must decide whether to stay with him or face the nightmare of divorce. Kay and Simon begin to act out their fury, blaming not only Jack but also Deb for somehow letting the affair happen. More than just another account of marital infidelity and its effects, this debut novel's strength lies in its portrayal of Kay and Simon as they struggle to fit in socially and make sense of the family situation. To add a little whimsy, Pierpont highlights Simon's teenage self-absorption as he smokes pot for the first time and Kay's preoccupation with writing "Seinfeld" fan fiction. Narrator Hillary Huber finds just the right tone between sadness and humor. VERDICT Readers seeking a cleverly written novel that takes a penetrating look at family dynamics will love this. ["Pierpont wields words like beautiful weapons. This short novel is a treat...and shows off an exciting new voice on the literary landscape": LJ 4/15/15 starred review of the Random hc.]-Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

There is nothing unusual about the plot of Pierpont's first novel about a New York family of four. Jack is caught having an affair, and now he and his wife, Deborah, and the kids, 15-year-old Simon and 11-year-old Kay, have to figure out how to deal with it. Although countless novels take flight from this predicament, Pierpont's concentrated domestic drama is piquantly distinctive, from its balance of humor and sorrow to its provocatively off-kilter syntax, original and resonant descriptions, bristling dialogue, snaky psychological insights, and escalating tension. And all the particulars are intriguing. Jack, a Texan, is a successful artist about to detonate his career. Deborah is a former ballerina turned teacher who, having grown up in the suburbs, is a touch intimidated by her city kids. The revelation of Jack's affair hits Simon and Kay like a bomb. As they reel, their grandmothers are pulled into the maelstrom, and certain family members behave atrociously. With acid wit and thoughtful melancholy, Pierpont catalogs the wreckage, mourns the death of innocence, and measures varying degrees of recovery, achieving a Salingeresque ambience.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist

Long-simmering tensions boil over in the Shanley household to devastating effect in debut novelist Pierpont's drama of domestic unravelling. It's not that the news contained in the anonymous package is a surprise to Deb: not the hundreds of emails documenting her husband's affair and certainly not his lover's cliched confessional which accompanies it. It's that her 11-year-old daughter, Kay, stumbled upon the box first and that she and her 15-year-old brother, Simon, have now read their father's messages ("i can't explain why i get so sad when you make me so happy") that makes the reality unbearable. And so begins the dissolution of the Shanleys or, at least, the Shanleys as they once were: Jack, the successful sculptor and not-unlikable narcissist married to Deb, the former ballet dancer who happily traded her career for motherhood. As their marriage crumbles, Jack and Deb set out on separate courses away from New York. Meanwhile, Kay and Simon contend with the loss while navigating their own coming-of-age struggles. We know how the story ends because Pierpont tells us: a spectacularly melancholy interlude midway through puts an end to any suspense. But suspense is hardly the point; it's the characters' rich emotional lives that propel the story forward. Deb and Jack and Simon and Kay could easily have been reduced to typesthe suffering wife, the womanizing husband, the stoned teenage son, the sensitive tween daughterbut in Pierpont's hands, they're alive: human, difficult, and deeply lonely. It's loneliness that's at the novel's core, hitting unsentimentally and with blunt, nauseating force. Which is not to say that there isn't serious humor among the heartbreak (Kay's penchant for writing Seinfeld fan fiction is a particular delight), and for all the book's sadness, much of its lingering force comes from Pierpont's sharp-witted detailing of human absurdity. A quietly wrenching family portrait. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.