Obvious and overlong, but nevertheless a well-mannered tale, narrated at a nice steady pace in the best old-fashioned way.
In an updated and more geriatric version of Now, Voyager, Sedgwick (The Dark House, 2000) portrays a young psychiatrist unlocking the closets and airing out the skeletons in the ancestral home of an unhappy Boston Brahmin.
Madeleine Bemis is one of those dignified old New England women who can’t lose her good taste even in the midst of a nervous breakdown: One day she is found in Filene’s, curled in a fetal position in the bedding department’s best four-poster. Also in the store is a psychiatrist, Alice Matthews, who intervenes and helps check Madeleine into a mental hospital. Madeleine becomes Alice’s patient, and, in the course of her treatment, she and Alice become good friends. Profoundly depressed and not given to self-revelation in the best of times, Madeleine tells her story with the greatest reluctance and only after much prodding from Alice. The daughter of a prominent though not especially wealthy Boston family, Madeleine made a good marriage to a handsome and extremely eligible young man with whom she lived contentedly for many years, until his death in 1979. But there were parts of her past that remained hidden from everyone in her world—even from her husband. The most prominent of these was the affair she had with Gerald, a gardener who worked briefly for her parents during WWII. Slightly crippled with a deformed foot, Gerald was a dark, brooding sort unlike any of the men Madeleine had met at her family’s dances and parties. As Alice slowly pieces together the fragments of Madeleine’s recollections, she becomes aware of another person who seems to be haunting Madeleine as well: a younger man named Brendan, who was recently found by swimmers, floating dead in the ocean. But who was he? And what was he to Madeleine?
Obvious and overlong, but nevertheless a well-mannered tale, narrated at a nice steady pace in the best old-fashioned way.Pub Date: May 3, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-019565-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
None
"If you can't deal with the morning, get out of the game." Maria Wyeth can't deal with the mornings or the long, disintegrating nights—she's been married to and divorced by Carter; she has a hopelessly damaged four-year-old and the insistent, regretful memory of an abortion; she's made a film or two; and she drifts from Hollywood to New York to Las Vegas and from bars to motels.In fact she's the kind of girl whom one of her looser contacts will call up and say "Did I catch you in the middle of an overdose" and this is the kind of scene which is "beaucoup fantastic." You may remember Run River (1963) which was about another scuffed spirit like Maria whose dissolution was as complete. But even though you have every reason to suspect that this is an ephemeral form of survival kitsch under its sophisticated maquillage, you won't be impervious.
None NonePub Date: July 13, 1970
ISBN: 0374529949
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1970
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PERSPECTIVES
Simultaneously melancholy and sweet at its core.
A body washed up on the shore of Lake Superior moves a family to rewrite its 100-year history in Webb's (The Vanishing, 2014, etc.) new novel, set equally in each era.
Lake Superior, which has always been known for its legends, one day reveals a new mystery when an unidentified body clutching an equally dead baby washes up on the shore near Kate Granger’s family home. Kate, who’s come to town only recently in an attempt to recover from a breakup with her philandering husband, is captivated by the young woman, who’s been appearing to her in dreams. Police know the family too well to suspect Kate was involved in the crime, and she’s allowed to travel within the area to stay with her cousin Simon at the Harrison’s House, a stately former family home the unerringly nice Simon inherited and that he and his partner, Jonathan, have revamped into a B&B. Interspersed with chapters about Kate’s search for the identity of the body is the story of Great Bay in 1889 and the early life of Addie Cassatt and her friend Jess Stewart. Addie’s story sounds almost like a fable, from her birth in a lake that seems to love her to her first meeting with Jess, a boy who seems fated to be always by her side. Things grow more complicated when Jess goes away to college and begins to wonder about life beyond his small town and to ask whether Addie can be the woman he needs to help him achieve his professional dreams. As Addie learns about the limits of love, Kate learns that love may return when she’s introduced to Nick, a police officer willing to invest as much time in identifying the body as Kate is. With the support of Simon and Nick, Kate tries to learn from her dreams and believe the impossible, even if it means connecting the body to a centuries-old mystery entangled with Kate and Simon’s own family history.
Simultaneously melancholy and sweet at its core.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-0082-0
Page Count: 347
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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