A slow-burning tale questioning what people owe to their spouses and to themselves.
A woman is torn between her writing career and the demands of her ailing husband in Phelps’ debut novel.
Amy James has a green thumb: In addition to managing her own exceptional garden, she writes a gardening column for her local newspaper. Her house, too, is exceptional, thanks to her husband, renowned architect Graham James, whose career has always overshadowed her own. Amy has found modest success collecting her columns into a book, and now she’s under contract to write a second one—a collection of essays about “unique female gardeners and their stunning garden designs.” It’s been hard to focus for the last year, however, due to Amy’s mother’s illness and death. (Annoyingly, “There was never a question of asking” the decade-older, self-absorbed Graham “to step up.”) Just as she’s finally beginning to visit the gardens she plans to write about, Graham delivers a shocking bit of news: He’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. As she tries to balance the preparations for Graham’s deteriorating health—which include selling their house and her garden with it—with traveling the country to do the necessary research for her book, Amy finds herself stretched beyond her limits. When her personal desires come in conflict with her marital responsibilities, which will she tend to, and which will she allow to wither on the vine? Phelps writes probingly about Amy’s marriage and her ambivalence toward it: “Even when not thrilled with the direction of their lives, she’d learned to find small, real pleasures in the white space of his ever-colorful life. It was an accommodation that they both accepted.” Though the stakes seem minor at first—the pressures of her book agent, her difficulties communicating with her husband—the pressures grow steadily in a way that makes the ending, when it arrives, feel truly explosive.
A slow-burning tale questioning what people owe to their spouses and to themselves.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781039189997
Page Count: 348
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Sullivan, winner of Milkweed's 1996 National Fiction Prize for her fifth novel, this follow-up to The Cape Ann (1988), limns with discerning sympathy the struggle of a young girl to escape the terrible toll of a mother's mental illness. The story is set once again in the small town of Harvester, Minnesota; the time now is the mid-1930s, when Sally Wheeler's mother Stella begins having crying spells. She cries when Sally enters kindergarten, she cries in department stores, she cries over anything remotely sad. By the age of seven, Sally resolves that she will never cry as long as she lives. And while her mother gets worse, sinking farther and farther into a depression blamed on menopause, Sally struggles to live a normal life. Sullivan's insights into a child's desperate need for normality and acceptance give immediacy to her story. Close friends like Lark and Beverly- -characters from The Cape Ann—help, as do adults like Lark's mother Arlene Erhart and the widowed Mrs. Stillman and her shell- shocked son Hillyard. Grandparents are loving and attentive, and so is father Donald, but nothing can compensate Sally for her mother's worsening condition. Stella is eventually hospitalized; Sally and her father become the subjects of local prejudice; and, as Sally moves on to high school, these pressures take their toll: Her grades decline, she begins sleeping with boys, and she becomes involved with pathologically possessive Cole Barnstable. A drama teacher, recognizing her acting ability, helps her find some contentment, but when he dies in an accident, Sally falls apart, retreating into herself and cleaning house obsessively, although good friends do come through. Finally encouraged to realize her talents, Sally writes and stars in the ``The Kingdom of Making Sense,'' a play celebrating a place ``where everything is possible, for sadness rarely lasts beyond an hour.'' A perceptive and refreshingly unsensational account, if at times too slowly paced, of a child's determination to claim and affirm life.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-57131-011-8
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
The symbolism of Mary and child coming to liberate the immigrants may be heavy-handed, and occasionally Hussein’s language...
The first novel in English from one of the most important writers in Urdu, an Indian-born author (The Weary Generations, 1999) virtually unknown in the West. That should change.
The story is narrated alternately by Amir, an illegal immigrant in Birmingham, and by his teenaged daughter Parvin, who, having come to England at five, is struggling between the traditional expectations of her father and her desire to enter into the life of her adopted country. Adding drama are the time-shifts between Amir’s first coming to Birmingham and the present, when he is a legal homeowner but nevertheless engaged in a running battle with his wife and children, who have little idea of his struggles to give them a new and better life. It’s a conflict that brings to mind such writers as Henry Roth and Roth’s vivid images of the Lower East Side, as well as V.S. Naipaul with his tales of Indian immigrants in the Caribbean. But, while Abdullah does not suffer from such comparisons, his novel is unique in its depiction of a particular kind of suffering in what most of us consider a civilized country. Unforgettable, for example, is Amir’s memory of living in a house with eight other Pakistanis and his description of their absolute terror at being discovered by the authorities. One of the men finds a lover named Mary, who gets pregnant and later becomes the catalyst for a violent struggle that will break up the group home and force Amir and the others out on their own. After much difficulty, Amir becomes a British citizen, gets a job at the post office, and buys his own home. His dreams are realized, yet he doesn’t do nearly so well with his wife, daughter or son, all in different ways rejecting their father and the life he has chosen for them.
The symbolism of Mary and child coming to liberate the immigrants may be heavy-handed, and occasionally Hussein’s language can be awkward. But altogether Émigré Journeys is a remarkable performance.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-85242-638-1
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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