From Publishers Weekly
Peyton Amberg is a travel agent who really gets around-in more ways than one. In her latest no-holds-barred take on urban malaise, Janowitz (Slaves of New York, etc.) chronicles the international romps of a modern-day Madame Bovary. With her stunning looks ("usually it would be impossible to find a man who, physically, was her equal"), Peyton has no trouble luring men to bed, but under pressure from her manic-depressive mother, she hastily marries an unsuspecting dentist for money and out of fear that no one else will deem her marriageable. Struck with a bout of ennui after her wedding and tired of trying to live up to the expectations of her in-laws, she rushes back to work and almost immediately takes a cheap trip to Brazil, where she meets a debonair German-Italian man, Germano. In the first of many misadventures, Peyton holes up with Germano in her hotel room, where she is wined and dined and otherwise entertained. With her libido unleashed, she finds it next to impossible to return to a normal life in her apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and she pulls further away from her husband and, eventually, her young son. Though she perceives herself as self-sufficient, she becomes more and more addicted to her extramarital hanky panky ("A monkey in the zoo... could not have gone on a wilder bender on a weekend pass from its cage"), finding satisfaction in the beds of gangster Xian Rong in Hong Kong and cowboy Sandy in Vegas. Peyton's overactive id and sense of dissatisfaction seem a bit contrived at times, and her comeuppance rather old-fashioned, but Janowitz's trademark mix of humor and gross-out realism give the novel a queasy charge. Author tour. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Billed as a modern-day Madame Bovary, Janowitz's tenth book traces the rise and eventual ruin of a woman who believes her only resource is her beauty. Bored with her job and desperate to move out of her family's filthy apartment, Peyton marries the first man who asks. She's soon disenchanted with marriage and drifts into a series of infidelities. When her beauty begins to fade, her increasingly desperate need for male attention drives her into situations at first merely humiliating but ultimately degrading and dangerous. Janowitz's eye for the sordid detail is as merciless as ever, and she's in her element describing Peyton's squalid childhood home, her drug-addled and delusional mother, her increasingly dreary succession of affairs, and her nebbishy husband. Ultimately, though, the ferocity of her writing underscores the novel's major flaw: Peyton is so ineffectual and passive, and the supporting characters so uniformly unappealing, that there is little to care about in the story of her downfall. Janowitz built a following with Slaves of New York (1986), one of the defining books of the 1980s, and she also won acclaim for her recent novel A Certain Age (1999). Readers will be interested in her latest. Meredith Parets
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
Peyton Amberg is a young woman growing ever restless in her marriage, and ever hopeful that the next bed will produce someone more exciting. As she moves from man to man, she slowly but surely loses her youthfulness, her good looks, even her sanity, as her paramours become rougher and the sex more brutal.

A savvy riff on the classic figure of Madame Bovary, Peyton Amberg is a caustic and brilliant satire of contemporary marriage, as it charts the free-floating lust and exploits of a woman yearning for fulfillment outside of rigid societal structure.

Tama Janowitz's Peyton Amberg is nasty, funny, jaundiced, sarcastic, searingly honest, and mesmerizing from beginning to end.



From the Inside Flap
"One of the funniest books I have read, and the bleakest . . . This is a novel about class and sex in America, raw, rude, upsetting, and immensely invigorating." - Fay Weldon, writing for The Guardian (U.K.) "A no-hold barred take on the international romps of a modern-day Madame Bovary." - Publishers Weekly "A writer of considerable talent." - The New York Observer "A penetrating eye." - New York magazine


From the Back Cover
"One of the funniest books I have read, and the bleakest . . . This is a novel about class and sex in America, raw, rude, upsetting, and immensely invigorating."
- Fay Weldon, writing for The Guardian (U.K.)

"A no-hold barred take on the international romps of a modern-day Madame Bovary."
- Publishers Weekly

"A writer of considerable talent."
- The New York Observer

"A penetrating eye."
- New York magazine



About the Author
Tama Janowitz exploded onto the literary scene in 1986 with her bestselling book Slaves of New York. Her work has appeared in many publications including the New Yorker, Vogue, the New York Times op-ed page. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In her new novel, Tama Janowitz now targets a young woman growing ever restless in her marriage and ever hopeful that the next bed will produce someone more exciting. As she moves from man to man, Peyton Amberg slowly but surely loses her youthfulness, her good looks, even her sanity as her paramours become rougher and the sex more dangerous.

A savvy riff on the classic figure of Madame Bovary, Peyton Amberg is a caustic satire of contemporary marriage as it is undermined by free-floating lust and the exploits of a woman yearning for fulfillment outside of a rigid societal structure.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

Janowitz's harsh view of modern sex and her smooth way around the ugliest of encounters can makes for vivid reading. She writes with brazen realism, but replaces Flaubert's poetic brutality with crude shocks. — Mary Elizabeth Williams

Publishers Weekly

Peyton Amberg is a travel agent who really gets around-in more ways than one. In her latest no-holds-barred take on urban malaise, Janowitz (Slaves of New York, etc.) chronicles the international romps of a modern-day Madame Bovary. With her stunning looks ("usually it would be impossible to find a man who, physically, was her equal"), Peyton has no trouble luring men to bed, but under pressure from her manic-depressive mother, she hastily marries an unsuspecting dentist for money and out of fear that no one else will deem her marriageable. Struck with a bout of ennui after her wedding and tired of trying to live up to the expectations of her in-laws, she rushes back to work and almost immediately takes a cheap trip to Brazil, where she meets a debonair German-Italian man, Germano. In the first of many misadventures, Peyton holes up with Germano in her hotel room, where she is wined and dined and otherwise entertained. With her libido unleashed, she finds it next to impossible to return to a normal life in her apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and she pulls further away from her husband and, eventually, her young son. Though she perceives herself as self-sufficient, she becomes more and more addicted to her extramarital hanky panky ("A monkey in the zoo... could not have gone on a wilder bender on a weekend pass from its cage"), finding satisfaction in the beds of gangster Xian Rong in Hong Kong and cowboy Sandy in Vegas. Peyton's overactive id and sense of dissatisfaction seem a bit contrived at times, and her comeuppance rather old-fashioned, but Janowitz's trademark mix of humor and gross-out realism give the novel a queasy charge. Author tour. (Oct.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Janowitz has been through plenty of ups and downs since the publication of her best-selling The Slaves of New York in 1986, but here she returns to form. In her twenties, Peyton marries a dentist named Barry because he seems "nice." The marriage disappoints her from the time she starts planning the wedding with her pathetic but pretentious prospective mother-in-law. Soon after, she develops a taste for casual sex with men in exotic locales-a desire that is easily satisfied when she becomes a travel agent. It may seem that Peyton is in control, but she is ultimately used and discarded by the men she encounters. The time frame shifts throughout, and readers gradually realize the profound depths of Peyton's alienation from her own life. Part satire, part grim reality, this work brutally dissects the nature of what parades as a happy marriage in America. For all public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/03.]-Diana McRae, San Lorenzo Lib., CA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews