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A Familiar Tale, Told With Style

July 25, 2008

Those in search of summer beach reading might pick up The Romantics, a new novel by Galt Niederhoffer ’97.

According to Janet Maslin of the New York Times, Niederhoffer succeeds at breathing new life into an all-too-familiar scenario: the story unfolds at a wedding in which the maid of honor, the bride’s college roommate, has a “history” with the groom.

In the novel, Maslin finds overtones of “well-wrought cynicism.” She appreciates the heroine’s “sharp eye” for the “tribal habits” of the bride’s WASPy family, and particularly likes the depiction of the mother of the bride:

Augusta is capable of growing indignant about iceberg lettuce when Tom’s family puts it on the menu at the rehearsal dinner.

This week’s New Yorker discusses the novel in a downright catty tone, though the account dwells more on the proceedings at a book party for Niederhoffer in New York than on the book itself. Author Rebecca Mead notes the similarities between the heroine, “clever, ill-at-ease, Brooklyn-dwelling Laura Rosen,” and Niederhoffer herself, “the clever, ill-at-ease daughter of the eccentric investor Victor Niederhoffer [’64].”

Harvard Magazine mentioned Ms. Niederhoffer’s first novel, A Taxonomy of Barnacles, in the May-June 2006 Off the Shelf.