For those unable to jet off to a Spanish island this summer, reading “The Vacationers” may be the next-best thing. Straub’s gorgeously written novel follows the Post family — a food writer named Franny; her patrician husband, Jim; and their children, 28-year old Bobby and 18-year-old Sylvia — to Mallorca. 
The island is brought to life irresistibly, “a layer cake” when Franny first spies it, and their vacation house “looked like an actual present.” But all is not perfect in vacationland. Jim has recently been let go from his position as the editor of a men’s magazine after a dalliance with a young employee who also happens to be the daughter of a board member. Franny had planned this island idyll before their lives were upended by the affair; during this trip, she must decide whether their marriage will survive or implode. On the island, the Posts are joined by Franny’s best friend, Charles; his husband, Lawrence; and Bobby’s girlfriend, Carmen, all facing challenges of their own. Charles and Lawrence are waiting to hear if they’ll be chosen to adopt a baby; Bobby and Carmen’s relationship isn’t faring much better than Jim and Franny’s.
This glimpse into the Posts’ real-estate-blessed lives (“Was Riverside Drive too far, too remote?” Jim wonders, considering the possible loss of their gigantic Manhattan house to a divorce. “Could he live in the 90s?”) might give the less fortunate reader an attack of the Mallorca-deprived blues, but the novel’s joy and humor are infectious. Straub may be an heir to Laurie Colwin, crafting characters that are smart, addictively charming, delightfully misanthropic and fun. Franny waxes on the pleasures of “being alone in the kitchen,” and her passion for her children, for her friend Charles, for food, love and travel, illuminates the narrative. “Being in a foreign country made even the smallest differences seem like art,” Straub observes. When I turned the last page, I felt as I often do when a vacation is over: grateful for the trip and mourning its end.
