Pete Dizinoff, a skilled and successful New Jersey internist, has a loving and devoted wife, a network of close friends, an impressive house, and, most of all, a son, Alec, now nineteen, on whom he has pinned all his hopes. But Pete hadn’t expected his best friend’s troubled daughter to set her sights on his boy. When Alec falls under her spell, Pete sets out to derail the romance, never foreseeing the devastating consequences. In a riveting story of suburban tragedy, Lauren Grodstein charts a father’s fall from grace as he struggles to save his family, his reputation, and himself. Amazon Best Books of the Month, November 2009 : In A Friend of the Family , Lauren Grodstein, author of the breakout debut novel, Reproduction Is the Flaw of Love , goes to even greater literary heights with a contemporary suburban drama brewing with an undercurrent of violence that, with each turn of the page, takes on the weight of an American tragedy. As the book opens, Peter Dizinoff, a successful New Jersey doctor, is struggling to adjust to the aftermath of his actions as the foundation of his personal and professional life crack beneath his feet. At the center of his troubles is his beloved son Alec, who deflates his father's high expectations when he drops out of college after just three semesters and moves into the apartment above their garage. And when his son begins seeing Laura, the troubled daughter of Peter's best friend who is ten years older than Alec and lives in the tainted shadow of being acquitted for an unspeakable crime when she was 17, Alec's ambivalence to his father's hopes in living a good life turn into a simmering rage. Dizinoff, a man with a clear definition of right and wrong, flips back and forth in time as he narrates the history of events that build their way to a layered, emotionally wrenching climax. -- Brad Thomas Parsons "A gripping account of paternal love gone wildly astray." —Helen Schulman, author of A Day at the Beach ( Helen Schulman ) "The moving, complex, beautifully written story of a good man who's slowly losing his grip on his life and his family, A Friend of the Family unfolds with unerring precision." —Kate Christensen, author of Trouble ( Kate Christensen ) "What a wonderful and compelling read. This book is full of insights and honesty, and you will have a hard time putting it down. These people will stay in your head and keep their hands on your heart. Grodstein's skills at storytelling are unwavering." —Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize winner for Olive Kitteridge ( Elizabeth Strout ) “With suspense worthy of Hitchcock . . . Grodstein is a terrific storyteller.” —The New York Times Book Review ( The New York Times Book Review ) “The novel is spot-on in its depiction of affection and jealousy among longtime friends; boozy suburban bashes; unrequited love; and adjusting to middle age . . . A Friend of the Family beautifully captures the ever-striving angst of parents who will take any step to ensure their children's lives are easier or better. Parents sweating through a teen's college applications would do well to spend some time with Dr. Pete.” —USA Today ( USA Today ) “Grodstein’s harsh, honest prose makes this haunting tale worthwhile.” —People ( People Magazine ) "Stunning . . . She has written a novel that will leave her readers sitting up, sifting the evidence in the dead of night." — The Boston Globe ( The Boston Globe ) “Absorbing . . . an incisive diagnosis of aspirational America . . . What Grodstein captures so strikingly is the anxiety of a father's love, that aching affection . . . Grodstein never pushes these characters into caricatures. She has a sharp ear for the discordant tones of conversations between parents and their almost adult children . . . Grodstein is such a perceptive and knowing critic of suburbia that I kept expecting to see her driving slowly up and down my street peering in the windows . . . The last 50 pages of the novel swell to such a gripping climax . . . Horrifyingly plausible and deeply poignant, A Friend of the Family will leave you shaken and chastened—and grateful for the warning.” —Washington Post ( Washington Post ) From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Ron Charles My younger daughter has just gone off to college. To the wrong college, of course, where she's taking all the wrong classes and befriending the wrong people and basically ruining her chances of ever having a successful life. Or at least that's what I used to think during insane moments of midnight paranoia. I'm better now, largely because I've just finished Lauren Grodstein's absorbing new novel, "A Friend of the Family." It's about a devoted dad whose parental concerns fester into a toxin that eventually poisons his life. There's nothing polemic or didactic about Grodstein's story, but she's written such an incisive diagnosis of aspirational America that someone should hand out copies at Little League games