You Only Call When You're in Trouble by Stephen McCauley

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on January 9, 2024

The literary market never tires of amusing domestic dramas about affluent people who live on the East Coast. You Only Call When You’re in Trouble is a novel of first world problems, the self-inflicted problems of upper middle class white people who have too much time on their hands. Yet the reader knows that everything will work out for most of them because, after all, that’s what happens to East Coast characters of comfortable means in amusing domestic dramas.

Cecily is 34. She teaches American Studies at a college in Chicago. It’s a tenure-track position and her class is popular because she shows a lot of videos. She has been in a relationship with Santosh for two-and-a-half years. Santosh’s mother, Neeta, doesn’t approve. It doesn’t help that Cecily is being investigated by her employer for sexual misconduct. Cecily accepted a grant to write a book that allowed her to take a semester off from teaching, but she doubts she will be able to return to work (or to finish writing a book that no longer interests her). To keep Cecily’s taint from spreading to Santosh, Neeta implements a plan to make Santosh choose between them.

Cecily’s mother, Dorothy, is too preoccupied with her own problems to pay attention to Cecily’s life. After a series of business failures, Dorothy is opening a retreat center in Woodstock with Fiona Snow, the author of a self-help book that was entirely rewritten by a ghostwriter. The book earned a mention on Oprah ten years earlier. Fiona’s meager fame has since faded.

The only stable man in Cecily’s life is Dorothy’s brother Tom, an architect who specializes in “small spaces.” Tom has recently broken up with Alan, largely because Tom is more devoted to Cecily than he is to Alan. Tom is having problems at work due to an unreasonable client named Charlotte who happens to be a friend of Dorothy. Charlotte and her husband Oliver are quite wealthy, perhaps accounting for their status as the novel’s least agreeable characters.

Cecily is a likeable enough character. She has the good sense to recognize that she had “grown up white and middle class in a privileged part of the country during a period of relative stability and economic advantage.” Dorothy is a loving if somewhat ditzy mother and Tom is a caring uncle. Santosh plays a smaller role and is more difficult to like or dislike, although he is probably more judgmental in his assessment of Cecily than she deserves.

The novel’s focal point is a “gala” in Woodstock to celebrate the opening of Dorothy’s retreat center. The key characters all come together for the gala. Dorothy plans to use her time with Cecily to drop a bombshell — the true identity of Cecily’s father. The revelation occurs at about the novel’s midway point.

The story loses energy in its second half. The novel foreshadows certain confrontations. For the most part, they unfold as the reader will expect. In the modern fashion, the story ends with almost no plot threads resolved. Life goes on, except for one character, for whom it might not. We’ll never know unless Stephen McCauley writes a sequel. That’s unlikely to happen, but I was sufficiently engaged with the characters that I would probably read it. Readers who long for the days when stories had an actual ending might not be pleased with You Only Call When You’re in Trouble.

The novel’s amusement factor is high, in part because of its pointed observations. “In academia, discomfort of any kind was increasingly equated with trauma.” Cecily makes the valid point that colleges are “infantilizing twenty-year-olds at the exact moment they should be trained for adulthood.” Tom has a similar sense that therapists (including Alan’s) are always on the hunt for “Slights, Insults, Microaggressions, and Trauma” so they can polish them and add them to a trophy shelf. Tom thinks the tourist towns he knows “seemed both immensely appealing and utterly ridiculous.

Other fun sentences include:

“Like a lot of people who claim to resent the strictures and rules of middle-class, heterosexual life, Dorothy and even Charlotte got positively girlish at the mention of engagements, showers, and wedding dresses.”

“When he heard people talking about their longing for children, he suspected them of watching too much daytime TV.”

“Oliver’s sympathy, like that of most highly successful men, extended only to the people who didn’t need it.”

“Gray hair and CVs make for an inherently embarrassing combination, like condoms and senior discounts.”

For its skewering but good-hearted observations and interesting if predictable characters, You Only Call When You’re in Trouble is

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