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THE YEAR OF PLEASURES

Name: THE YEAR OF PLEASURES
Author: Elizabeth Berg
ISBN: 1-4000-6160-1

by Elizabeth Berg ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 12, 2005

Unhappiness, in Berg’s world, isn’t an option.

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The prolific Berg (The Art of Mending, 2004, etc.) champions middle-aged craziness in an impossibly sunny soap opera.

Betta Nolan, 55 and a former children’s book author, sells her Boston townhouse after her beloved husband John dies of cancer—and sets out for the center of the country to see what happens next. It’s not purely whim that draws Betta to the Midwest; she and John had once dreamed of moving to that part of the country. “We had always been charmed by the people we’d met from there, and it seemed the right place to start a new life: exotic, at least to us, but not as difficult as, say, Prague.” Her Boston house sells for $1.9 million, so she won’t have to take a waitress job to make ends meet, and she eagerly plunks down a ridiculously low sum for a Victorian treasure in Stewart, Ill. There’s still the matter of filling up a life, however, and between bouts of grieving, Betta does just that by looking up three old friends from college, befriending a handsome college student with a bitchy, unworthy girlfriend, and opening the store John once suggested she call “What a Woman Wants.” Meanwhile, Betta tries to decipher the scrawled notes her psychiatrist husband left behind. The answer to their mystery, like all the other not-so-very complicated roadblocks in the way of Betta’s starting over, is expressed in a platitude (“There is love in holding. And there is love in letting go”) that only soapy characters could fathom or follow. “We’re all just here, blinking in the light like kittens,” Betta’s friend Maddy confides. “The older I get, the more I see that nothing makes sense but to try to learn true compassion.” What a woman wants, Betta discovers, is to have perfect things in a perfect place, shared with perfect—or at least perfectly interesting—friends. “You don’t dishonor the one you loved by being happy,” Betta learns.

Unhappiness, in Berg’s world, isn’t an option.

Pub Date: April 12, 2005

ISBN: 1-4000-6160-1

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
EARTH'S THE RIGHT PLACE FOR LOVE
by Elizabeth Berg

- BOOK REVIEW
I'LL BE SEEING YOU
by Elizabeth Berg

- BOOK REVIEW
THE CONFESSION CLUB
by Elizabeth Berg

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TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT

by Ernest Hemingway ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 1937

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A somewhat puzzling book, but — all in all — it is good Hemingway, and a sure sale. Key West and Cuba form the settings for a tough story of men at the end of their tether, grasping at any straw, regardless of risk, to turn a few dollars. Rum-running, smuggling aliens, carrying revolutionary arms. Gangsters, rich sportsmen, sated with routine, dissipated women and men — they are not an incentive to belief in the existence of decent people. But in spite of the hard-boiled, bitter and cruel streak, there is a touch of tenderness, sympathy, humanity. Adventure — somewhat disjointed. The first section seems simply to set the stage — the story starting after the prelude is over. The balance forms a unit, working up to a tragic climax and finale. There is something of The Sun Also Rises,and a Faulkner quality, Faulkner at his best. A book for men — and not for the squeamish. You know your Hemingway market. His first novel in 8 years.

Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1937

ISBN: 0684859238

Page Count: 177

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1937

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LETTERS OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY
by Ernest Hemingway & edited by Verna Kale ; Sandra Spanier & Miriam B. Mandel

- BOOK REVIEW
DEAR PAPA
by Ernest Hemingway with Patrick Hemingway ; edited by Brendan Hemingway & Stephen Adams

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SHORT STORIES OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY
by Ernest Hemingway ; edited by Seán Hemingway

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THE PATRON SAINT OF LIARS

by Ann Patchett ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1992

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Patchett's first novel, set in rural Kentucky in a castle-like home for unwed mothers—where a good woman finds she cannot lie her way beyond love—has a quiet summer-morning sensibility that reminds one of the early work of Anne Tyler. Within the security of everydayness, minds and hearts take grievous risks. ``Maybe I was born to lie,'' thinks Rose, who, after a three- year marriage to nice Tom Clinton, realizes that she's misread the sign from God pointing to the wedding: she married a man she didn't love. From San Diego, then, Rose drives—``nothing behind me and nothing ahead of me''—all the way to Kentucky and St. Elizabeth's home for unwed mothers, where she plans to have the baby Tom will never know about, and to give it clean away. But in the home, once a grand hotel, Rose keeps her baby, Cecilia; marries ``Son,'' the handyman (``God was right after all...I was supposed to live a small life with a man I didn't love''); and becomes the cook after briefly assisting that terrible cook, sage/seeress, and font of love, Sister Evangeline. The next narrative belongs to Son, a huge man originally from Tennessee—like Rose, gone forever from home- -who recounts the last moments of his fiancÇe's life long ago (Sister Evangeline absolves him of responsibility) and who loves Rose. The last narrator is teenaged Cecilia, struggling to find her elusive mother within the competent Rose, who's moved into her own house away from husband and daughter. Like Rose years before, her daughter considers the benefits of not knowing ``what was going on''...as the recent visitor—small, sad Tom Clinton—drives off, and Cecilia knows that Rose, who left before he came, will never return. In an assured, warm, and graceful style, a moving novel that touches on the healing powers of chance sanctuaries of love and fancy in the acrid realities of living.