Olivia, or, The weight of the past

The future is looking bright for Caroline Ferrante. She is a gifted chef and irreverent cooking teacher who has just been tapped for her own television cooking show. Her relationship with her upstairs neighbor Leon - a doctor, yet - is thriving. She even seems to get along with Leon's children from his first marriage. But Caroline's past seems determined to undermine her future. The rebellious daughter of Manhattan academics, Caroline dropped out of college and fled to Italy as the mother's helper of family friends. There she was able to pursue her great passion, cooking, while also embarking on an affair with Angelo Ferrante, a volatile Sicilian. In fairly short order she found herself pregnant, married, and a full-time chef at the ristorante where Angelo also worked. The business thrived, and Caroline and Angelo's baby, Olivia, was the light of their lives. Then things started to go sour. Angelo began to quarrel with the restaurant's owners. At home he became increasingly domineering and brazenly unfaithful. And he began to turn his daughter against her mother, using Caroline's Judaism (or rather, his anti-Semitism) as a weapon. Eventually, when Angelo's behavior gave Caroline no choice but to leave Italy, twelve-year-old Olivia chose to stay with her father, refusing even to write or speak to her mother on the phone. Now Angelo has married a woman Olivia hates even more than she remembers hating her mother, so she decides to join Caroline in New York. But Olivia has a great deal of unfinished business with her mother, and Caroline, who'd dreamed of a loving reunion, instead faces a hostile adolescent who misinterprets her every word and action, present as well as past. Indeed, overcoming Olivia's resentment - while navigating a burgeoning career, an intensifying romance, and the treacherous straits of raising a teenager - is as tough as any challenge Caroline has faced. In Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Judith Rossner laid bare the desperation of the 1970s singles scene. In August, she took readers further inside psychoanalysis than anyone believed a novel could go. Now, with Olivia, she weaves a tale of mothers and daughters, of best intentions and bitter regret, of food and rage and love.