So on Nov. 6th, having finished another Leavitt novel, I by chance looked on my Kindle to discover that I also had THIS book of his - courtesy of an ARC from Netgalley and Bloomsbury (thank you and apologies!) from four years ago, when it was first published in the wake of the first wave of the pandemic and the end of Hewhoshallnotbenamed's first term in office. Looking at the first line: ' "Would you be willing to ask Siri how to assassinate Trump?" Eva Lindquist asked.' I was certainly intrigued, and when I learned the book opens on the night of his upset victory in 2016, I was hooked.

One would think in the wake of the unthinkable happening once AGAIN, I wouldn't want to be reminded of the horrors to come, but I actually found the book rather comforting, seeing how we have been there before - and survived. The book centers around Eva and her husband Bruce, upper class Manhattanites and their (rather too) large circle of friends and acquaintances and how they muddle through. I suspect the title was changed to cash in on the pandemic, which does NOT feature in the book, since the book ends in early 2017 - but more or less refers to the fact Eva gets a notion to buy an apartment in Venice (Italy, not CA.) and refurnish it as a coping mechanism.

The book is really just an utter delight, and I quickly raced through the book, finishing the second half in less than a day. Amongst the many pleasures is the fact that several of the characters are writers or in publishing, and Leavitt has great fun casting snarky comments about the likes of Sheila Heti, Lydia Davis, and Barbara Kingsolver. It stands apart from his other novels I've read, which tend to center around more lurid gay dramas, but he really is an excellent wordsmith in both mediums. So glad I discovered this at such a fortuitous time.

Well written, but very much a book of it's time. I don't know that it will read the same in a few years.

I loved the sly realistic fiction aspect of this book! It was so fun and like. a characterization of people. Well done!

This book is less about sheltering in place, and more about finding a person or a place in your life that makes you feel secure. It's an interestingly written romp of rich people, who you might think would not have the same worries and insecurities as the "have nots" but you would be wrong. I loved the dialogue and the banter, but it was definitely a bit of a tough read because of the style. Hard to describe, but certainly interesting. Plus, any book that starts off pontificating about getting rid of a certain political figure is a good time.

I have no idea why I finished this book. There is little to no plot as you spend 300+ pages with the worst kind of privileged people complaining about how difficult their lives are. I thought there was going to be some sort of social commentary about upper class yuppies in a post-Trump world, but this ended up being about a self-involved woman buying an apartment in Venice and all the terrible people surrounding her. The most interesting character is the queer interior designer and he mostly flits around the edges of the story until the very, very end when you get an entire info dump about his tragic back story.

This is a book for someone looking for a drama about terrible people thinking their insignificant problems are the worst ones in the world.

I think I was the wrong audience for this book. I read amazing reviews where there is so much deep meaning found in trivial things, such as the thought that one should avoid Diet Coke since Trump drinks it, but myself? I did not make these comparisons. I saw it as a very surface level book full of vain Manhattan residents living their upper-society lives.


I received an advanced copy. All thoughts are my own.

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing on October 13, 2020

Shelter in Place is a novel of first world problems. The kind of problems shared by prosperous New Yorkers who have a weekend home in Connecticut. Sex in the City problems. In fact, when Sandra Brook, Min Marable, and Rachel Weisenstein get together, their dialog would fit nicely into a Sex in the City episode. Mostly they gossip about people who aren’t present, including Matt Pierce, who has been crashing on couches since he broke up with his boyfriend after resisting pressure to participate in three-ways.

Matt used to cook for Eva Lindquist until he made the mistake of asking her for advice about his relationship problems. Eva’s friends wonder where she finds so many handsome gay men who get paid to cook and to “keep her company, lose at cards, and agree with everything she says.”

Eva is in the process of buying an apartment in Italy, a project that annoys her husband Bruce, who works as a wealth manager. Bruce is annoyed in part because of the legal snafus Eva keeps encountering and the bribes that are required to untangle them. Eva wants to live in Italy as a response to Trump’s election. She also wants her friend Jake Lovett, a well-known interior designer, to decorate the apartment. Jake is on the fence about that request, one of many sources of tension that permeate the lives of the characters. Jake’s business partner adds some additional tension, or at least snark, concerning Jake’s career path.

Min is a magazine editor who worked at Self before moving to Entfilade, a magazine that focuses on shelter. She’s encouraging Jake to decorate Eva’s Italian apartment by promising him a magazine cover. Whether she will be able to keep that promise is an open question for much of the novel.

The plot is largely the stuff of soap opera. Bruce is secretly funding his secretary’s battle against cancer. Rachel mistakenly suspects her husband of having an affair with Sandra, who recently left her husband and is busy sorting herself out by having an affair with Bruce. Jake’s reluctance to travel to Venice relates to his memories of a tragic relationship. It is to David Leavitt’s credit that none of this becomes melodramatic. Still, all of the characters make their own problems, a common affliction of financially comfortable first world inhabitants. It’s difficult to generate sympathy for any of them, although sympathy might not be expected or intended.

Shelter in Place is grounded in shallow people making witty conversation. The characters spend a good bit of time discussing literature although it’s not clear that they spend much time reading. One of them attacks Barbara Kingsolver as “the embodiment of liberal piety as its most middlebrow and tendentious” without having read much of her work (he claims to have “dipped in”). The characters either love or hate (mostly hate) Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, and Jonathan Safran Foer, perhaps because those authors all write more deeply than the characters are capable of feeling.

The novel lampoons political correctness as practiced by people who care more about how they are perceived than about political or social issues. Rachel stops wearing her pussyhat, for example, when another character tells her that the hat is racist because it’s pink and “not every woman’s . . . you know . . . is pink.” Characters make a point of letting their friends know that they oppose Trump but never engage in the slightest degree of liberal activism. A conservative character argues that liberals pretend to like things they actually detest (like sorrel soup) because they’re expected to like them. I’m a liberal but I think there’s some truth in that observation. On the other hand, the conservative character delights in expressing abrasive opinions, presumably because modern conservatives relish being offensive.

Bloomsbury explains that Shelter in Place is a “slyly comic look at the shelter industry.” Apart from featuring two interior designers and a magazine editor who are apparently part of the “shelter industry,” the novel has little to say about housing, apart from the difficulty of acquiring clear title in Venice. The comedy is too sly to be noticeable, although the erudite wit in the characters’ conversations is probably meant to deliver low-key amusement. In that regard, the novel at least partially succeeds.

Not surprisingly in a “sly” story about empty characters, the story itself feels a bit empty. The reader follows the characters as they interact with each other for a few days, determinedly showing off their intellect and political sensibilities, but to what end? I suppose there is value in showcasing empty lives that purport to be good lives and perhaps that is the story’s purpose. In the end, the narrative trails off, leaving every conflict, such as they are, unresolved.

Notwithstanding the negative tone of this review, I thought the dialog actually does reflect a certain degree of wit. I enjoyed the precision of David Leavitt's prose. While I would have enjoyed the book more if the characters had all jumped off a bridge in Venice (we learn about but never meet someone who did that), I can guardedly recommend it to readers who don’t mind plotless novels about disagreeable characters.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

I was personally unable to finish reading this title.Thank you to the publisher and author for the opportunity of advanced access to Shelter In Place.

The book opens with a group of Eva’s friends, devastated by the results of the 2016 presidential election, coming together at her country house in Connecticut to commiserate.
They are New Yorkers, living in a world of the arts, decorating, publishing, writing, and for Eva’s husband, Bruce, finance. It seems Eva is the Gertrude Lawrence to this non glitterati group; they all congregate at her homes, subservient to her control.

Convinced she must flee the horrors that await the new Administration, Eva is hell bent on purchasing an apartment in Venice as an escape. She in encouraged in this venture by her old friend, Min, who would love to spend time there. The catch is, she will only purchase it if her long time decorator, Jake, agrees to take on the project.

I enjoyed this novel with its breezy, witty dialog and, for the most part, “Rolex” or First World problems. It is an entertaining, distracting, fast read.

David Leavitt's Shelter in Place is a novel mostly relayed in dialogue. The premise points the focus to a group of indolent shallow people's reaction to Donald Trump's election in 2016. That is only the jumping off point. The book is so much more - it's a truly fascinating glimpse into what defines safety and security for the various characters. The character profiles are simple, definitely unlikeable, but intriguing nonetheless. Shelter in Place will make an excellent book discussion selection. There were many instances when I just wanted to close the book and talk with other readers. I can not say I enjoyed the novel, but I can say I was entertained.
3.5 I received my copy through NetGalley under no obligation.

David Leavitt’s marvellous novel Shelter in Place opens in November 2016, right after the presidential election. Childless couple, 56-year-old Eva and her wealth management advisor husband Bruce, are hosting a motley assortment of houseguests at their Connecticut home. The people we meet that night: Min Marable, decorator Jake Lovett, married book editors Aaron and Rachel Weisenstein, neighbour Grady and his cousin, recently separated Sandra comprise almost all the book’s characters, although a few more appear as the plot fans out.

Although it’s a “benevolent autumn sunset,” Eva’s mood, extreme distress at the prospect of Trump as president, eradicates the sense of peace and relaxation. A debate ensues about free speech with Eva announcing that she’s “possessed by this mad urge” to ask Siri how to assassinate Trump. Interestingly, once Eva starts the fireworks, she doesn’t actually go through with it, but instead tells her husband to do it. From this point, everyone jumps in with their opinions on this “thought experiment.” Min, who says she’s Eva’s best friend, (translation: sycophant and object of belittlingly criticism) defends Eva (as always) noting her Jewish background and concern about fascism. One of the houseguests concludes that Eva’s preposterous and toothless statement that she would do anything to defend democracy makes her a “teensy bit fascist.” Another debate ensues about “majority rule.”

This evening becomes the leaping point for the rest of the story. Eva, feeling that she can’t stand to remain in America for the inauguration party, leaves for a holiday in Venice, taking along mooching, much put upon journalist Min. Once in Venice, Eva decides to buy a palazzo apartment, and it’s the beginning of a real estate transaction nightmare and also the beginning of a deep rift between Bruce and Eva.



Shelter in Place, a comedy of manners, takes a spiky look at the affluent New Yorkers in Eva’s orbit. Eva is a spoilt, vastly uninteresting, hollow, self-focused woman, one of the 1% cushioned by vast wealth and therefore the least likely strata of society to feel any societal turbulence. She becomes so consumed with repugnance at the thought of a Trump driven America, she decides to leave. While neurotic Eva calls Trump a “demon,” this dreadful woman (think of Judy Davis in Husbands and Wives) terrorizes most of those in her circle. She loves to patronise people with the grandeur of her liberal, moral opinions–opinions that don’t hold up under scrutiny, so, for example, she’ll have an impoverished pet chef for a while until he “touched the third rail.” And then there’s Min: Eva will shove cookies and food at Min and then humiliate her for eating whenever the opportunity arises (and especially if there’s a third person as witness).

Quiet Bruce acknowledges that as a couple, he and Eva “have a system. She does the wanting and I do the paying.” As the deal for the Venice apartment becomes more complex and dodgy, Bruce, for the first time in his married life considers denying his wife’s whims, but at the slightest hint of Bruce’s resistance, Eva turns on the marital screws. She mouths platitudes about how politically she’s “refusing to do what everyone else is doing, which is either lapsing into this state of terrible ennui or putting all their energy into looking the other way.” So she garlands herself with noble status for bailing from the country while others don’t–and yet how many Americans can afford to go and buy an apartment in Venice just because they feel like it? (Or even a trailer in the Salton Sea?) And of course before long it becomes obvious that escape from Trump is just a narrative for Eva to get what she wants. Eva talks about political oppression and yet treats her servants and friends appallingly. Meanwhile, Bruce ponders the life and financial circumstances of his long-term secretary Kathy who is undergoing treatment for cancer. Kathy has been dumped by her husband (when he heard about the diagnosis), she’s drowning in debt and supports both of her impossibly selfish children. Kathy isn’t a martyr to duty; she’s a realist and in spite of her many troubles, she blames no one.

Shelter In Place, a very clever title, also refers to decorator Jake, who has emotionally ‘sheltered in place’ for decades following a tragedy. He finds it safer to engage in sexting with strangers than take a risk with real flesh and blood relationships. There’s are wonderful sections involving Jake and his partner Pablo, both decorators, each with a different aesthetic, attitudes, and motivations.

The point wasn’t to create a room that reflected their personalities. It was to create a room where they belonged.

It’s hard to relate to the privilege some of these characters enjoy–the millions they fling around and yet at the novel’s core we see humans struggling with their lives, finding excuses to bail. Ultimately Eva is a case study in a horrible human being: not ‘bad’ in a criminal sense, but a woman who’s been so indulged that she’s become a tyrant, holding everyone in her orbit in thrall, never called on her bullshit accounts of her past and present. Some of the funniest scenes involve her 3 Bedlington terriers–all named after characters from the novels of Henry James. It’s through these three dogs, we see Eva at her most intolerant worst, bitching at Bruce for walking the dogs with a neighbour who voted for Trump and then coming unglued from her perfect world when her dogs start peeing on the furniture.

One of my favourite characters is the perennially angry Aaron; fired from his job, he now simmers in the stew of failure. While he’s a liberal, he wants to take PC-ness and tear it out of society; so far he’s doing a pretty good job of it as a one-man wrecking ball. He attends a Lydia Davis book signing, although he can’t stand her work, claiming, as he holds up one of her books that the problem isn’t that young people don’t read but “what they read. Shit like this.” When told he doesn’t ‘get it’ because he’s “a man,” Aaron cuts loose:

Fine, then, Jeffrey Eugenides. He’s a Jerk-off. As is Jonathan Fucking Franzen, and Jonathan Fucking Lethem, and Jonathan Asshole Safran Foer. All of these fucking Jonathans, they’re total jerkoffs.

Then he launches into Barbara Kingsolver:

She is the embodiment of liberal piety at its most middlebrow and tendentious. Her novels are the beef ribs of fiction.

And:

Ninety percent of what gets published is worthless. With any luck, that’ll be the silver lining of this fucking election, that when writers start to feel oppressed again they’ll start to write books worth reading instead of all that idiotic upper-middle-class self-absorbed liberal navel-gazing crap we got when Obama was president.

If you can’t tell. I loved this book.

Review copy

This book was about spoiled rich people. There is a compelling story in there, I just couldn’t find it. I am not opposed to a book about spoiled rich people. However, those books usually feature likeable characters who want to grow or who learn a lesson. If the character is unlikable, that works too if we get that s/he is a villain. This book was just none of those things. I do not think the description actually describes what this is. I am glad people like it, but it did not click.

3.5 stars - This is a mostly charming book filled to the brim with great dialogue and quite the cast of characters.

This book centers around a middle-aged group of friends and the first page immediately starts off in November of 2016 when Trump wins the presidency. The group is devastated but move on with their privileged lives as they shift in other ways. One buys a house in Venice, another decides to give his secretary money for cancer treatments, one loses a job, another gains a job, one starts and affair, while another ends one. These friends are continually a part of each other’s lives even through their changes.

This book seems to be almost all told with great dialogue that is clever and quick-paced. I would get lost in the fun conversations during their dinner parties in which everyone was speaking at the same time and it felt like a genuine get-together.

The characters are mostly unlikeable, but the older I get the more I realize that doesn’t entirely matter as much. It’s still a great cast and the characters feed off of each other well.

Finding the differences between a house and home is a pretty big theme in this book. From stately Connecticut homes, shabby NYC studios, dilapidated Venice apartments, to luxurious hotel rooms, we are constantly going from one setting to another and comparing them. What makes someone feel comfortable in a place? Is it living with family or alone? Is the space immaculately decorated by a designer or is it filled with your own things? The characters are all trying to figure this question out in their own lives throughout this book.

Thank you to @netgalley and @bloomsburypublishing for the chance to review this delightful book.

Love to hate the people in this novel, which could not be more timely. Delighted to include it in the monthly hotlist October roundup for Zoomer magazine's Club Zeb book club, online at this link

DNF @35%

Thank you, Netgalley and Bloomsbury for the digital ARC, but unfortunately I found this novel unbearable to get through. The synopsis is much more intriguing than my actual reading experience. My big gripe was Leavitt's writing style. Very clunky and long-winded for my taste. Bad writing is the #1 I usually DNF a book. It's a shame because I think "Shelter in Place" could've been a quiet sleeper.

Though Shelter in Place should gain recognition for the most on-the-nose book title of 2020, I think it might also be pretty polarizing. For anyone who thinks that white people in positions of privilege need step out of the spotlight, this might be the most tone deaf book ever released. For people who perceive this as a pointed critique of those people whose stories are perpetually in the spotlight due to their color and economic class, this book might land a little softer. My reaction is someplace in the middle.

I've read several of David Leavitt's books (Family Dancing, The Lost Language of Cranes, Equal Affections, Arkansas: Three Novellas, The Page Turner, The Two Hotel Francforts, Goodreads tells me. Wow.), and one of the things that I struggle with is how emotionally remote he keeps his characters from his readers. That feeling didn't occur to me reading Shelter in Place, but the exclusivity of their lives sure did, and I assume that's Leavitt's aim.

I thought the book was fine; a three-star read with all the good and bad connotations that rating carries. It was quick and painless apart from the intentional cringeworthiness of the main female character who spends the entire book in a post-2016-election state of terror at the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency (reasonable, even while the character expresses her terror with mounting hysteria and (view spoiler). But its pieces did not fit together very well. Leavitt didn't seem as interested in some of his characters as others, and, ultimately, there were too many of them to give more than cursory attention to in a book that was only 224 pages.

If you like timely books that have truly funny moments about monied New Yorkers and the people who orbit them, you could do much worse than this one. But if you see red at the prospect of hashtagwhitepeopleproblems even when they are presented somewhat satirically, you should probably look elsewhere.

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My thanks to Netgalley for an opportunity to read and review this book.

Shelter in Place....is an easy concept for the affluent characters who fill the pages of David Leavitt's newest release. Wickedly funny at times and absurd at others this story is not just about the 2016 election and its consequences but also a lesson in how people with money and influence can chart their own course differently than the less fortunate-which may be an allegory to the election itself and smart literary technique by Leavitt. As a reaction to the election wealthy Eva decides to fly to Venice during the inauguration to avoid coverage of "he who shall not be named" and quickly buys an apartment that becomes an all-consuming project for her and distraction. This distraction sends her husband onto a different path than she intends and a cast of colorful, if mostly unlikeable characters, round out this commentary on affluence, power and consequences.

The clever dialogue is 4-5 star worthy; however when finishing the novel I still asked...so what? The vapidness of the mostly shallow supporting characters, aside from some minor plot points that were almost more interesting than Eva and her Venetian apartment, and the lack of focus result in a 3 star read.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest feedback.

This book vastly improved in the second half. The first half was very slow & I found myself nodding off no matter what time of day I tried to read, but I was completely engaged in the second half & it whizzed by. I think the problem is that this book was built around a theme instead of a plot or a character. The plot and the characters were then designed around that theme, which unfortunately led to a thin plot and very little character development. Instead of a central story, this book is more made of a series of vignettes. This series of conversations would have made a much better play than a novel.

This is such a hard book to write about. I had the impression that it was going to be all about a group of New Yorkers’ reactions to Trump’s election, and was almost dreading that, but it’s not really about that. It’s more about how people grab onto different notions of safety and home when their emotional comfort is disrupted.

Eva Lindquist is the character the story revolves around, though she is a supremely unlikeable character. She is spoiled, remote, and unwilling to put herself out for anybody—or even consider anybody else’s circumstances. When she decides she must buy an apartment in Venice to flee to, and that apartment must be bought for her by her wealth manager husband, Bruce, and decorated by her longtime interior designer, Jake, that sets in motion not just a train of change in their lives, but in their entire circle of friends and acquaintances—and even their dogs.

The book is probably three-quarters dialog. Normally, I don’t enjoy such a heavy dose of dialog, but this was so well written that I didn’t mind. Even though I don’t have anyone like these people in my life (for which I’m grateful), I came to know them through their words and to understand how their lives worked. Not sympathize, but just to understand how their day-to-day lives operated and how that, and their backgrounds, affected their reactions to the external forces on them.

I’m still wondering what inspired David Leavitt to choose to write about these lives, which are so far removed from most people’s. Yet I’m thinking about the book a day later, and that means he was effective at creating a world and making me want to read about it.

Thank you @netgalley for the ARC, I wouldn't have known anything about this novel if I hadn't been looking through the lists of a new book to read and a new author to be exposed to.

Let me say this... The opening paragraph made me snort outloud.


The rest of the book not as much. Now that may seem cruel, it isn't. There are other reviews out there that will give you the synopsis and deeper dives into the content of the book... I am not here to rehash any of that information.

The book opens on the Saturday after the President is elected in 2016. Let it be said the main character of the book isn't too pleased and that is the basic premise of where the book takes us, I guess.

I appreciated that the characters were wealthy literary folk. It made the conversations and situations plausible and entertaining. I was transported to a part of New York Literati that I will never be able to experience. I felt very much like I was eavesdropping at a fancy restaurant on people I would never actually know.

Rich people.

Rich entitled people who can afford to by houses / apartments in another country and have their decorator fly to design the space. It was so out of my very own league that it made the concept of the book entertaining but maddening. I suppose reading it when the nightly podcasts and news tell me how many people are unemployed, reading about a character who buys an apartment in Venice because she nary wants to live in this country anymore under the current (as of November 2016) presidency rings a lot hollow to me. I wanted to like these characters... but I just couldn't. I couldn't get there. Plus all the characters were using one another in a way that just was so hollow. I don't think truly any of them like one another very much.

The writing and the dialogue is expansive, lovely and honestly what kept me engaged. But it was a hard one to finish for me. I just sorta stopped caring about the main characters and some of the secondary characters. Also some characters completely disappear. There is one ... who could have become a much bigger character I think... just sort of stopped being in the story. It was weird. So when the book ended and just kinda tidied everything up in a nice little bow I was satisfied.

I liked the book. It was good. Not great. It needed a little more zing and zang that I think a good decorator would give to a Venice apartment with bland beige walls and an overgrown garden could.

Which is kinda the way the book goes. Great promise... a couple of great potential story lines that just kinda didn't really go anywhere like I hoped.