An impressive step forward for an increasingly serious entertainer.
Polly Solo-Miller Demarest has all that she always expected to have: "a husband, two children, a strong family, and a month's summer holiday in Maine. Once she was married, her life had been so accomplished that all she had to do was live it. But it turned out that life was not a straight path. You woke up on the wrong side of the law with the right set of feelings."
That wrong side of the law is represented here by Lincoln Bennett, a painter with whom Polly has been having an inextricable affair—one that goes against the grain of her upbringing (among the rich, Jewish, very correct, and close Solo-Millers), of her love for lawyer-husband Henry. And, though the family is a haven and fidelity is a spine in a life that's otherwise treacherously jellied: "What did a smoothly run house, good meals, sweet children, and an admirable husband matter if you felt your heart being torn to pieces?" Such is Polly's quandary—and it's fleshed out with some of Colwin's most heartfelt prose: the mix of pain with authorial breeze and social-antenna perceptiveness is occasionally quite spectacular in terms of tone; there are fewer jokes than in Happy All the Time, though some of the comic description is inspired (an after-dinner pianist "played exclusively as background, but the expression on his face was that of an ingenious veterinarian who had quelled a room of anxious schnauzers"); and Colwin's drumming insistence on the conflict between (and complexity within) personal and family happiness gives this novel more than a little Russian flavor—Chekhovian intimacy, Tolstoyan responsibility, longueurs and passions. So, though the ruminant theme announced in the title flattens some of the feeling here (Polly's agony comes across only fitfully, the hurt and confusion muted by the author's nervously churning reflections), Colwin is to be credited for having gone beyond the mere charm of her previous work. And if the ingredients for emotional combustion never quite explode in this richly ambitious novel, they are graceful, unsimplified, very often strikingly—and fully—stated.
An impressive step forward for an increasingly serious entertainer.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 1982
ISBN: 0-06-095897-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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