Escaping the “melting concrete armpit” of Manhattan is what many New Yorkers will be dreaming of in the infernal months ahead. When the tarmac starts to gleam and descending to the subway becomes a Dantean prospect, a couple of weeks in a Mallorcan villa sounds like just the ticket. You’re in luck! Open Emma Straub’s The Vacationers (Riverhead Books, 2014), and that’s exactly where you’ll find yourself. As elder son Bobby observes, “The Posts were masters of self-delusion, all of them”. But in Straub’s second novel it is the fate of the Post family to have their eyes comprehensively de-wooled. The Mallorca trip was supposed to be a celebration of Jim and Franny’s thirty-five years of marriage, but in the wake of a seismic indiscretion on Jim’s part, that notion has come to seem like “a joke with a terrible punch line”. His career at a men’s lifestyle magazine called Gallant has recently come to an ignominious close after the revelation of an affair with a twenty-three-year-old editorial assistant called Madison. Franny, herself a successful journalist and writer, is devastated. In addition to the prospect of losing her husband, her younger child, Sylvia, is set to depart for college in […]