"Happiness runs in a circular motion" - Donovan - and this novel is La Ronde indeed! Lorna, mom and grandmother, art expert, is fed up with the flirtations of her French husband and returns to San Francisco and her kids, grandkids, and a mess of a city. She's got to find an apartment (nothing affordable) and re-establish her career (no one's interested). Her progeny are also neck-deep in financial problems and it seems that only Lorna's first ex-husband's second wife's money can solve them. But it might be even worse for Ran, the ex-husband, and Amy, his wealthy second wife - their daughter Gilda, a fifteen year old with diabetes, becomes pregnant after a back seat stand with a twenty year old college student. Lorna's two families, the two ex's, and her two countries all seem doomed to disaster. There's a big cast here, but Lorna's character, wisdom, and humor shine through and her light leads the way to a satisfying conclusion that begs for a sequel. ( )

This was too slice-of-life-y for me and just seemed directionless with characters I could give or take. ( )

Diane Johnson, the queen of novels about American ex-pats in France, now follows one of her ex-pats back home. Lorna Mott is a woman of a certain age who has been living in France with her second husband (French) for twenty-five years. Now finding him still philandering (a his age!), decides to throw him over and go back home to San Francisco. She has a plan to pick-up her long-discarded career as a lecturer on art history, to have a little pied-a-terre in San Francisco, and to straighten out her grown children.
However, she soon finds that things have really changed in twenty-five years. The only apartment she can afford is a semi-seedy one in the foggy Avenues, the powers to be in the art world don’t seem very anxious to set her up on the lecture circuit, and her children…well, one is a depressive divorcee eking out a living selling crafts on Etsy, another seems to have absconded to Thailand with funds belonging to his business, and the third while still dreaming of being a musician, is pretty much just a failure. And let’s not even discuss her former husband who has taken a tech zillionaire for his second wife and is living the life that Lorna thinks that she deserves.
Johnson throws all these characters into a wonderful stew of international manners as Lorna comes to realize that just maybe you can’t go home again after all. ( )

This book gets a bit overwhelming with all the complications of the various members of the family. Only a few of the narrative strands get resolved. ( )