Mourning Glory

Mourning Glory is Warren Adler’s 1996 social-comedy novel and a bracing follow-up to his more famous The War of the Roses. Grace Sorentino, a broke Palm Beach single mother whose ex-husband has left her with a daughter to put through private school, decides to systematically attend wealthy widowers’ funerals as a way out. She reads the obituary pages, dresses appropriately, presents herself as a discreet acquaintance, makes herself useful in the early grief, and waits. The setup is grotesque on paper. The book makes it work because Grace is a fully realized scammer with a fully realized conscience.

Adler is very good at sustained tonal management. Mourning Glory is funny in places, cold in places, suspenseful in stretches, and quietly furious about Palm Beach class structure throughout. Grace’s eventual mark, Sam Goodwin, is too well drawn to be a satisfying victim, which is the novel’s engine: the reader spends two hundred pages waiting for her to give up the con and a hundred more waiting for her to commit to it. The ending is appropriately ambivalent.

Recommended for readers who liked The War of the Roses and want a quieter, more interior Adler, and for anyone looking for books like Mourning Glory in the Patricia Highsmith / Liane Moriarty tradition of women-with-very-specific-plans. Four stars, and a much-underrated Adler title.