BLUE HEAVEN

by Elaine Kagan ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 12, 1996

Actress/author Kagan's (The Girls, 1994) exploration of the fateful ties and traditions that bind women together, for better and sometimes for worse. Eighty-year-old Mollie Ventimiglia, who lives in Kansas City with her third husband Lew, is suffering from senile dementia and declining fast. When Gilliana, Mollie's middle-aged daughter, finds her own marriage in trouble, she decides to escape Los Angeles and head to Mollie and her own childhood home, where she is shocked to find her mother incoherent and Lew exerting every scrap of energy to give her the care she needs. When she quits L.A., Gilliana leaves not just her husband behind but 17-year-old-daughter Clare, who is naturally worried about both her parents' marriage and her grandmother's questionable health. But Clare is not her mother's, or her grandmother's, daughter for nothing; in Gilliana's absence, she grits her teeth and stays on good terms with her troubled dad, contemplates and then decides against having sex with her boyfriend, and searches for a theme for her college application essays. Meanwhile, back in Kansas, Lew and Gilliana have to decide what to do with Mollie, and Gilliana has to decide what steps to take in her own life. Over the course of the present-day narrative, Mollie and Gilliana's personal histories (and failed romances) emerge; Mollie's WW II wedding to a dashing gambler (Gilliana's father), and Gilliana's passionate affair with famous comic Anthony Ronzoni--whose untimely death left her irrevocably scarred--give Clare (who is sent for by Gilliana and present at Mollie's eventual death) insight into her own life, and help give Gilliana, on whom everybody else's fate hinges, the strength to make the decisions she has no choice but to make. Nonsensical title and strained historical references aside, an undeniable poignancy colors Kagan's attempt to show three generations of women coming to terms with each other at the end of a life.

Pub Date: April 12, 1996

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996

Categories: FICTION