Let's Not Do That Again by Grant Ginder

Published by ‎ Henry Holt and Co. on April 5, 2022

Let’s Not Do That Again is the story of a mother-daughter relationship that frays due to poor communication and mistaken beliefs. The family drama offers a typical reconciliation moment, followed by a dramatic moment that straddles the border between horrific crime fiction and dark comedy. A couple of romantic subplots round out the novel. One involves a senator’s gay son and an FBI agent. The other asks the recurring question: When two people in the early stages of love do something really awful together, will it bring them closer together or send them to separate prisons?

Nancy Harrison is a congressional representative who is running for a Senate seat. She won her husband’s seat in Congress after he died. During her Senate campaign, her daughter Greta drunkenly joins a French nationalist protest in the streets of Paris and hurls an empty champaign bottle through the window of everyone’s favorite overpriced restaurant. Greta has no interest in nationalism because, without immigration, the US would have no Italian food. Greta’s motive involves her animosity toward her mother, stoked by her paternal grandmother and by her sexual attraction to Xavier, a French nationalist whose project is to determine “how wholly corrosive love can be.”

Greta’s act of defiance is captured on a cellphone video. After it goes viral, Nancy’s political opposition accuses Greta of being a communist while branding Nancy as the world’s worst mother (something to do with “family values”). The novel is rooted in the unfortunate reality that attacking politicians based on the actions of their children is a thing now.

Nancy sends her son Nick to retrieve Greta from Paris. Nick is gay, has slept with most of the gay men in New York, and is close to Greta, having raised her while Nancy was making laws in Washington. Greta, whose issues with her mother are explained as the story marches forward, thinks Nancy is happy to have a gay son as a symbol of her progressive values. Nick, on the other hand, has spent his life cleaning up the messes made by Nancy and Greta. He’s getting sick of that role, leading the reader to wonder how he’ll respond to the final and biggest mess that comes near the novel’s end.

The other two characters of note are Nancy’s campaign manager Cate Alvarez and her co-worker Tom Cooper. They don’t benefit from the same character development as the Harrison family members, but they play an important role in the novel’s key event. How that event will affect their blossoming relationship is another question that the plot will need to address.

Let’s Not Do That Again is marketed as a comedy. The novel’s darkest moment is best viewed in that light. As a comedy, however, the story offers few laughs. There are elements of parody in the novel’s take on politics and privilege, and an ongoing joke about Nick’s attempt to base a musical on the life of Joan Didion is amusing. The novel’s humor is largely infused in Grant Ginder’s descriptive writing. Walls in a restaurant are “the color of radioactive egg yolks.” Greta refers to a co-worker at an Apple store as “annoying, the sort of person who couldn’t pick up on a hint if it had its hands around his balls.”

The novel is carefully constructed. Seemingly unimportant details in the early pages turn out to have significance. The novel’s lesson is the familiar stuff of light fiction — families are a mess but, in the end, we’re glad to have them. A less familiar lesson is that new beginnings and fresh starts are a myth. We can’t detach from a past that shaped us; we can only try to make sense of the past so that we can do better tomorrow. The novel’s most interesting question is whether it’s possible to live with the guilt of keeping secrets from those we love if revealing those secrets will harm others that we love. Maybe the novel’s lessons and questions aren’t profound, but the story that embodies them is entertaining.

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