MRS. RANDALL

by Christopher T. Leland ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1987

Romantic novel served up as a purÉe of masterpieces of Modern American Literature. By the author of Mean Time (1982). A Faulknerian prologue, set in 1904, starts things out as a young woman gives birth to a love-child and then, in deference to the cruelties of social propriety, gives the baby up, never to see him again. The young woman, fabricating a story to explain her origin, starts a new life by going to the southern town of Franksville, marrying an older man (a state senator named Mr. Randall) and then, on the senator's death, marrying his protÉgÉ, the successful but materialistic and increasingly mean-spirited small-town lawyer Gambetta Stevens. All might have gone well in maintaining an appearance of happiness in this local picture-book marriage if ""Mrs. Randall"" (as she's mainly referred to in the book) could have had children: but a chain of heavily symbolic miscarriages puts strain on the marriage, and then a particularly vicious town lynching (which her husband could have prevented but, concerned for his reputation, implicity condoned) ends all but a public front of happiness, as Mrs. Randall determines ""to share no more her bed with him."" These events are narrated by Gambetta Stevens, Jr., only child from his father's first marriage. Called ""Gams"" for short, the boy falls in love with ""Mrs. Randall"" from the very start and forms a soul-partnership with her as he grows up against the backdrop of the town's bigotry and gossiping small-mindedness; though she never confides in him about the deep dark secret in her past, he remains faithful to the image of this fine, inwardly suffering woman even as he goes to college in California (in the last year of WW I), stumbles into a Hollywood career, becomes a screen star, a bit of a leftist, and finally an exile abroad, hiding from the witch hunts of the 50's. He returns home only for the death-by-cancer of Mrs. Randall, who carries the secret of her first and only true love with her to the grave. Wolfe, Anderson, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Lewis and Cather--in style, symbol, and idea--are rolled into a nostalgic fantasy-factory here that, for those who don't mind their literary melodrama in hand-me-down form, chugs right along.

Pub Date: May 1, 1987

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1987

Categories: FICTION