The Good Nanny

by Benjamin Cheever

Book Overview

The Cross family's new nanny is perfect. A natural with children, a whiz in the kitchen, and a gifted painter, the only thing Miss Washington can't seem to do is make a mistake. But thanks to Stuart... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1582341222
• ISBN13: 9781582341224
• Release Date: July 2004
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Length: 278 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.9" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Readable but here is what the book is REALLY about

Look at the cover of this one and you may can't really get a sense of the focus, the gist of this book. Is it a horror tale about yet another nanny gone bad? Is it about a nanny who steals the children's hearts, leaving the working parents in second place in their children's hearts? Well, no, it isn't really about any of those things,although they might be minor points in this book. To me, this book was mainly a morality tale about ambition and where it can lead people and how their lives can get terribly muddled by trying to balance so many things -family life, work, hiring a nanny, wondering if the nanny is a criminal, etc. I'm not sure why this book hasn't gained more of a readership but it deserves to be read- and discussed. The parents struggle with guilt as they leave their children in charge of the nanny,even though the nanny seems to be about as perfect as a caretaker could be. As the parents become more suspicious, readers can't help but wonder about the nanny as well- and that makes for suspense and tension. The ending is a bit too pat and unbelievable for my taste but that doesn't offset the strengths of this work. Where is suspicion warranted and when is it merely a projection of guilt and ambivalence? How do high earners cope with loss and change? All of these themes are covered in this small, but not insignificant, book.

Guaranteed to Make you vote for a tax on large estates

A neoconservative take on The Nanny Papers. If you found the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina hysterical you'll roll on the floor laughing. Still, a read is recommended if only because you'll be sure to vote for a tax on large estates afterward.

Now just imagine how it feels

"Nobody cares about line editors anymore," says The Good Nanny's Stuart Cross at a party he's hosting in his too expensive new house, a mansion with a three-car "garage mahal" in an elegant suburban community in upstate New York. "Nobody cares about the text at all. We didn't even read the most expensive book we bought last year. We paid two million for a name and title, for smoke and mirrors." "That was a bidding war," says Massberg, the junior editor and sycophant who will soon betray him. "There was no time to examine the manuscript. None of the other editors saw it either." This is what the publishing world has come to, in the US, in the UK, in Canada, and all over the continent of Europe. Once "a gentleman's profession" practiced by people who truly loved books, it was taken over by the money men in the late twentieth century, crass entrepreneurs who stomped into the venerable British and American publishing houses, purged them of their great editors, handed over their jobs to the kind of editors who knew how to toe the bottom line. The new regimes then began to publish truckloads of books, many of them blockbusters written by hacks, hoping that something or other would "take," and in order to make sure that at least a few of the books did, they paid huge advances for them in bidding wars, getting them media attention prior to their even being published and guaranteeing them future reviews. Other effects of the cynical realpolitik of this altered world soon followed: the Oprah effect; the effect of the Today Show, writers being transformed (if possible) into telegenic commodities, star-making, the creation of "bestsellers" months before actual readers got to hold the actual books in their hands. But because Stuart Cross and his wife (Andie Wilde) will have to commute to New York City to their dream jobs-he's a senior editor at Acropolis, an independent and respected publishing house, she's recently been appointed the film critic for the New York Post-they need to hire a nanny. So here comes Louise, the catalyst, a diminutive African-American woman who's been sent to the Cross household by the Mary Poppins Agency. Louise turns out to be an efficient young woman who's also a promising painter, having already made enough of a splash in the art world for the Museum of Modern Art to express an interest in buying her work. Stuart and Andie even begin to refer to her as "the paragon." And she is: she does light housekeeping and cooking, she teaches the children how to draw, she takes them to the Museum of Modern Art, she does their laundry, she reads them bedtime stories. She also reads them the following lines from a poem by Hilaire Belloc: He hadn't gone a yard when-Bang! With open jaws, a Lion sprang, And hungrily began to eat The boy: beginning at his feet. Now just imagine how it feels When first your toes and then your heels... The poem's "Bang!" cleverly foreshadows the novel's violent if somewhat improbable end and the lion'

A Winning Ben Cheever Country

It's a masterpiece! I could not put it down. Grand, biting humor, and effortless satire and the realism. My heart went out to his deftly crafted main chararcters, inhabiting the Ben Cheever Country, a different creation from the Cheever Country that so many of us admire. Mr. Cheever takes us, with ease, to a depot somewhere along the Metro-North railroad and entertains and, yes, at times shocks us with tales of his unique invention. His settings seem so near and yet far away in time and space, and his stories so beguiling and yet, realistic. The Good Nanny is a fierce contender for this year's award race and an instant classic. Ben Cheever is one of America's finest fiction writers.

Social Satire With A Glorious Edge

In an age where writers are too quickly elevated to a status of excellence undeserved, Ben Cheever quietly continues to produce the finest work of intelligent satire in America. THE GOOD NANNY delves deliciously into the heart of parenting, publishing and paranoia with delectable twists and turns along the way. Cheever revels in the subtle insights which bring characters to life, builds stories to a perfect pitch and offers observations on modern life that are simply unparalleled today. While others catch the headlines - with books like Little Children being anointed as chic suburban drama - there is simply no one producing the sort of satire as Ben Cheever does again in The Good Nanny. His humor is a razor finely honed, the ending of The Good Nanny honest and incomparable, not pandering. What a unique concept - Cheever actually respects the intelligence of his audience! The Good Nanny is a great work not to be missed.