Going to Pot

Sussex is damp and Little Watling Hall (its location not to be confused with Great Watling, East Watling or West Watling) is damper. The first half of Laurimore's debut is suffused with weather, rain, discussions of rain, discussions of discussions of rain. The British climate acts like a caricature of itself--and much of Going to Pot is about British and American stereotypes. In order to save their sinkhole of a stately home, Ivor Harley-Wright and his wife, Fliss, must persuade American lawyer Tom Klaus, agent of millionaire Constantine Ziminovski, to purchase Ivor's father's collection of commemorative drinking vessels. In order to convince him, they must charm him, and skeptical Tom is hard to impress. The Olde England that the Harley-Wrights show him strikes him as decrepit, dull and predictable. Tom, in his Burberry coat, is the picture of a Harvard-educated Anglophile, but the crumbling mansion where Fliss and Ivor live with their three children and Ivor's appalling mother, Martita (""Titty""), is a bit too much for him. The reader is reminded that Olde England is no one's real world, and the America Fliss eventually experiences on a visit to Mr. Z's luscious estate to install the collection is just as false. The characters almost never get to see beyond each other's facades of clich , but it's clear that they are facades, and that something else must be behind them. In the end, Fliss and Tom, thrown together under adverse circumstances in England and the U.S., do break out of their shells. But a lot of storms are weathered before they are able to do so in this offbeat, transatlantic farce. (Oct.)