"In the research pile there are books about advertising, De Beers, Paris, marriage and F.D.R."
--Whatever J. Courtney Sullivan's next project is (according to this New York Times description), I'm on board.
3 days ago
Showing posts with label j. courtney sullivan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label j. courtney sullivan. Show all posts
04 August 2012
11 July 2011
Up north
I found out J. Courtney Sullivan's second novel MAINE was about to come out through Twitter, as one does. Electronic galleys were being promoted specifically to romance bloggers, which struck me as odd since Sullivan's debut COMMENCEMENT, about four Smith graduates four years out of college, was described to me as making a big literary splash. And the more I read about MAINE, the harder pressed I was to find the romance in it because, spoiler alert, there really isn't one.*
Maybe "romance bloggers" was some kind of code for "people who enjoy ultimately evanescent, but pleasant books dealing with realistic problems." MAINE was very well-written, but if someone asks me in two years to summarize it, I probably won't be able to differentiate it from similar Jennifer Weiner/ Elin Hilderbrand families-on-Northeastern-vacation tomes -- which is different from saying I didn't enjoy it, because I did.
Like COMMENCEMENT, MAINE frames its world from the perspectives of four women, this time with a familial bond even stronger than college ties. At the beginning of the summer, Boston-born matriarch Alice Kelleher is up in Maine by herself at the cabin that has been in the family for fifty years, ever since her late husband Daniel won it in a bet. Unbeknownst to the family, Alice plans to leave the cottage and the now-incredibly valuable beachfront property surrounding it to a local Catholic church, but until then each of her children get a month: June is for Kathleen, long since moved to California to run a worm farm (!!!) but who plans to send up her daughter Maggie, a writer in New York. Maggie was hoping to bring her boyfriend Gabe, but they break up on the eve they were supposed to leave -- before Maggie had time to break the news that she's pregnant. July is for son Patrick and the perfect daughter-in-law Ann Marie, who by turns frets about Alice being lonely in the cottage and envisions the day her family will inherit it. (August is for third daughter Clare, who doesn't get much ink.) And as soon as everyone starts thinking how glad they would be to get up to Maine without interacting each other, you know their hands will be forced at some point.
Some of the details in MAINE are exact, and some are too exactingly precious -- like Ann Marie's obsession with her new hobby of decorating doll houses and entering them in competitions. O suffocating perfection is there. (But I for one appreciated the single telling detail of Gabe's friend who is described as saying "[Insert verb] this, motherfucker" constantly.) I just don't think that was enough glue. The one story that will stick with me is the revelation of a tragic incident in Alice's past that is explicitly given as how she ended up a great-grandmother instead of fulfilling her dream to be a painter in Paris -- and even given all that, her crustiness sometimes verges to nastiness.
The cloud hovering over the four women of MAINE isn't love at all, but rather money, and each woman's relationship to it. Alice owns the big house but reuses her tea bags, remembering how her father would threaten to beat her for not bringing home enough money from her job as a legal secretary during World War II. Ann Marie, from a similar background but insecure as an empty-nester, spends too much and frets about it, but not enough to make corrections to what she feels she deserves. Kathleen feels resented by the family for a special bequest in her late father's will, although she saw it as the price of independence from judgment for her divorce and AA membership. And Maggie, with a stable and flexible job, wonders if it's stable enough to support two, not even envisioning her future seaside retirement. In the end the women can talk about some of their contradicting attitudes, but not these.
Not growing up in a cabin-going family or culture is no impediment to having fun with MAINE, although those who did may be able to relate to the resultant tangle of family issues and roster of traditions such as outdoor showers and "summer people" versus the year-rounders. Better to read it closer to vacation than just after, though.
* There is, however, a hilarious anti-romantic figure in the young priest of the parish where Alice is bequeathing her property, who thereafter hangs around fixing stuff in the house and who Maggie has a brief crush on before realizing, right, a priest. No THORN BIRDSy stuff going on. Retroactive spoiler alert.
Maybe "romance bloggers" was some kind of code for "people who enjoy ultimately evanescent, but pleasant books dealing with realistic problems." MAINE was very well-written, but if someone asks me in two years to summarize it, I probably won't be able to differentiate it from similar Jennifer Weiner/ Elin Hilderbrand families-on-Northeastern-vacation tomes -- which is different from saying I didn't enjoy it, because I did.
Like COMMENCEMENT, MAINE frames its world from the perspectives of four women, this time with a familial bond even stronger than college ties. At the beginning of the summer, Boston-born matriarch Alice Kelleher is up in Maine by herself at the cabin that has been in the family for fifty years, ever since her late husband Daniel won it in a bet. Unbeknownst to the family, Alice plans to leave the cottage and the now-incredibly valuable beachfront property surrounding it to a local Catholic church, but until then each of her children get a month: June is for Kathleen, long since moved to California to run a worm farm (!!!) but who plans to send up her daughter Maggie, a writer in New York. Maggie was hoping to bring her boyfriend Gabe, but they break up on the eve they were supposed to leave -- before Maggie had time to break the news that she's pregnant. July is for son Patrick and the perfect daughter-in-law Ann Marie, who by turns frets about Alice being lonely in the cottage and envisions the day her family will inherit it. (August is for third daughter Clare, who doesn't get much ink.) And as soon as everyone starts thinking how glad they would be to get up to Maine without interacting each other, you know their hands will be forced at some point.
Some of the details in MAINE are exact, and some are too exactingly precious -- like Ann Marie's obsession with her new hobby of decorating doll houses and entering them in competitions. O suffocating perfection is there. (But I for one appreciated the single telling detail of Gabe's friend who is described as saying "[Insert verb] this, motherfucker" constantly.) I just don't think that was enough glue. The one story that will stick with me is the revelation of a tragic incident in Alice's past that is explicitly given as how she ended up a great-grandmother instead of fulfilling her dream to be a painter in Paris -- and even given all that, her crustiness sometimes verges to nastiness.
The cloud hovering over the four women of MAINE isn't love at all, but rather money, and each woman's relationship to it. Alice owns the big house but reuses her tea bags, remembering how her father would threaten to beat her for not bringing home enough money from her job as a legal secretary during World War II. Ann Marie, from a similar background but insecure as an empty-nester, spends too much and frets about it, but not enough to make corrections to what she feels she deserves. Kathleen feels resented by the family for a special bequest in her late father's will, although she saw it as the price of independence from judgment for her divorce and AA membership. And Maggie, with a stable and flexible job, wonders if it's stable enough to support two, not even envisioning her future seaside retirement. In the end the women can talk about some of their contradicting attitudes, but not these.
Not growing up in a cabin-going family or culture is no impediment to having fun with MAINE, although those who did may be able to relate to the resultant tangle of family issues and roster of traditions such as outdoor showers and "summer people" versus the year-rounders. Better to read it closer to vacation than just after, though.
* There is, however, a hilarious anti-romantic figure in the young priest of the parish where Alice is bequeathing her property, who thereafter hangs around fixing stuff in the house and who Maggie has a brief crush on before realizing, right, a priest. No THORN BIRDSy stuff going on. Retroactive spoiler alert.
11 July 2009
Back to school with J. Courtney Sullivan
It's been a few weeks since I finished Courtney Sullivan's debut novel COMMENCEMENT and I'm still not sure what I exactly want to say about it. Having read the positive-to-glowing reviews it was garnering before I started (I was hoping to use it for Talk of the Town, but it didn't work out), I wondered if they couldn't be attributed to rosy nostalgia -- most professional reviewers of the book being slightly more removed from their college years than I, memory having plucked the bugs off the lettuce of their salad days.
But the depiction of college is the truest thing about this book -- the petty squabbles that dominate campus, the random encounters occasioned by living with your friends, the myopia and the wonder. It's not hard to see why graduates of Smith College, where the book is set (and from where Sullivan graduated), have embraced the book, which I'm told uses real buildings and locations to orient its characters. While not all of the experiences described are positive, it's only out in the real world that the messes can no longer be contained.
COMMENCEMENT follows four Smith classmates reuniting for a wedding on campus four years after graduation. (One character even compares her first year after graduating to "freshman year of life," and so on.) Narrated in turn by each of the women -- the Southern-belle-turned-lesbian, the radical political activist, the nonprofit exec turned young newlywed and, of course, the perpetually single New York City publishing assistant -- the book looks back at their college memories and forward as they struggle with jobs they dislike, relationships moving to new places and milestones looming dangerously close.
The most direct reference point for the novel is THE GROUP, Mary McCarthy's 1963 novel about conflict and conformity among eight women graduating from Vassar in the '30s, but I found myself thinking more about Rona Jaffe's little read 1958 novel THE BEST OF EVERYTHING, about a group of women who meet in a New York City typing pool. Despite being set in the mom-and-pop '50s the novel feels somehow ahead of its time in its approach to ambition -- the women come to New York against their parents' wishes and, once employed, don't seem in that big a hurry to abandon their charming apartments and married lovers.
COMMENCEMENT's characters, coming of age when the quarterlife crisis was invented, must all have one, but none of them are particularly ambitious. That's not the only thing that made it feel slightly behind the times, but it didn't help. Its women are types, not necessarily clichés, but they still ran together in narrative voice to the extent that I had trouble telling them apart, although the girls emphasize among themselves how different they are and how much they've grown apart.
This presents a pretty serious narrative problem when the women reunite in the middle of the book for the wedding, and then after when something happens that would not be out of place in THE GROUP on the melodramatic scale. (A lot of reviews spoil this bit; suffice to say, one character gets into a situation which causes the others to reconnect on very short notice.) The differences is that in THE GROUP it would be over in two chapters, swept off to make room for the next dilemma, and here it consumes the novel. Just as it's about to tip into tedium, this plot strand is resolved in a way that I found, frankly, sadistic. It didn't completely drain my goodwill from the things I liked about it, but it made me wish I had skipped that chapter, and maybe a few of those before.
I'm still glad I read COMMENCEMENT because the combination of heiress-to-50s-career-girls and modern-fiction-set-on-a-campus was enough to pique my interest as it may yours. But if you're going to read it, I'm assigning you THE BEST OF EVERYTHING as a companion piece.
But the depiction of college is the truest thing about this book -- the petty squabbles that dominate campus, the random encounters occasioned by living with your friends, the myopia and the wonder. It's not hard to see why graduates of Smith College, where the book is set (and from where Sullivan graduated), have embraced the book, which I'm told uses real buildings and locations to orient its characters. While not all of the experiences described are positive, it's only out in the real world that the messes can no longer be contained.
COMMENCEMENT follows four Smith classmates reuniting for a wedding on campus four years after graduation. (One character even compares her first year after graduating to "freshman year of life," and so on.) Narrated in turn by each of the women -- the Southern-belle-turned-lesbian, the radical political activist, the nonprofit exec turned young newlywed and, of course, the perpetually single New York City publishing assistant -- the book looks back at their college memories and forward as they struggle with jobs they dislike, relationships moving to new places and milestones looming dangerously close.
The most direct reference point for the novel is THE GROUP, Mary McCarthy's 1963 novel about conflict and conformity among eight women graduating from Vassar in the '30s, but I found myself thinking more about Rona Jaffe's little read 1958 novel THE BEST OF EVERYTHING, about a group of women who meet in a New York City typing pool. Despite being set in the mom-and-pop '50s the novel feels somehow ahead of its time in its approach to ambition -- the women come to New York against their parents' wishes and, once employed, don't seem in that big a hurry to abandon their charming apartments and married lovers.
COMMENCEMENT's characters, coming of age when the quarterlife crisis was invented, must all have one, but none of them are particularly ambitious. That's not the only thing that made it feel slightly behind the times, but it didn't help. Its women are types, not necessarily clichés, but they still ran together in narrative voice to the extent that I had trouble telling them apart, although the girls emphasize among themselves how different they are and how much they've grown apart.
This presents a pretty serious narrative problem when the women reunite in the middle of the book for the wedding, and then after when something happens that would not be out of place in THE GROUP on the melodramatic scale. (A lot of reviews spoil this bit; suffice to say, one character gets into a situation which causes the others to reconnect on very short notice.) The differences is that in THE GROUP it would be over in two chapters, swept off to make room for the next dilemma, and here it consumes the novel. Just as it's about to tip into tedium, this plot strand is resolved in a way that I found, frankly, sadistic. It didn't completely drain my goodwill from the things I liked about it, but it made me wish I had skipped that chapter, and maybe a few of those before.
I'm still glad I read COMMENCEMENT because the combination of heiress-to-50s-career-girls and modern-fiction-set-on-a-campus was enough to pique my interest as it may yours. But if you're going to read it, I'm assigning you THE BEST OF EVERYTHING as a companion piece.
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