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Reynolds Price, The Surface Of Earth

Published in 1975, The Surface of Earth is the monumental narrative that charts the slow, inextricable twining of the Mayfield and Kendal families. Set in the plain of North Carolina and the coast and hills of Virginia from 1903 to 1944, it chronicles the marriage of Forrest Mayfield and Eva Kendal, the hard birth of their son, Eva’s return to her father after her mother’s death, and the lives of two succeeding generations.
The Surface of Earth is the work of one of America’s supreme masters of fiction, a journey across time and the poignantly evoked America of the first half of our century that explores the mysterious topography of the powers of love, home, and identity. In his evocation of the hungers, defeats, and rewards of individuals in moments of dark solitude and radiant union, Price has created an enduring literary testament to the range of human life.

( from the sleeve,   491 pages )

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Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, The Golden Rope

Doris Meek adored her twin sister, Florence. She was only too happy to play in her gifted sister’s shadow. And there she remained. For when Florence disappeared at the height of her career as an artist, she had disavowed Doris.
The world thought the great Florence Meek was an orphan.
For twenty years this fact made searching for Florence a psychological impossibility. But now Doris wants to know. Why did Florence carve a life for herself from lies and half-truths? And as she seeks answers, Doris begins to solve the greatest mystery of all: her own identity. . . .
“Fromberg Schaeffer is a highly accomplished writer.”
–Los Angeles Times Book Review
“In lush, romantic prose, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer uses the notion of twinship to explore the psychological predicament of coming to terms with one’s identity, an exploration that takes the form of a quasi-mystery story.”

( Courtesy of The Boston Globe,   366 pages )

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Samantha Harvey, The Wilderness

It’s Jake’s birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life – his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his mid-sixties, and he isn’t quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer’s.

As the disease takes hold of him, Jake struggles to hold on to his personal story, to his memories and identity, but they become increasingly elusive and unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? And why exactly is his son in prison? What went so wrong in his life? There was a cherry tree once, and a yellow dress, but what exactly do they mean? As Jake fights the inevitable dying of the light, the key events of his life keep changing as he tries to grasp them, and what until recently seemed solid fact is melting into surreal dreams or nightmarish imaginings. Is there anything he’ll be able to salvage from the wreckage? Beauty, perhaps, the memory of love, or nothing at all?

From the first sentence to the last, The Wilderness holds us in its grip. This is writing of extraordinary power and beauty.

( Courtesy of GoodReads,   328 pages )

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Jon Katz, Running To The Mountain

Jon Katz, a respected journalist, father, and husband, was turning fifty. His writing career had taken a dubious turn, his wife had a demanding career of her own, his daughter was preparing to leave home for college, and he had become used to a sedentary lifestyle. Wonderfully witty and insightful, Running to the Mountain chronicles Katz’s hunger for change and his search for renewed purpose and meaning in his familiar world.

Armed with the writings of Thomas Merton and his two faithful Labradors, Katz trades in his suburban carpool-driving and escapes to the mountains of upstate New York. There, as he restores a dilapidated cabin, learns self-reliance in a lightning storm, shares a bottle of Glenlivet with unexpected ghosts, and helps a friend prepare for fatherhood, he confronts his lifelong questions about spirituality, mortality, and his own self-worth. He ultimately rediscovers a profound appreciation for his work, his family, and the beauty of everyday life–and provides a glorious lesson for us all.

( Courtesy of GoodReads,   242 pages )

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Joan Barfoot, Gaining Ground

Gaining Ground was referred to me by another avid reader. It’s a forgotten novel, no longer in print but available from Amazon sellers. I’m so glad I found it. The story focuses on the essence of femaleness: motherhood. Leaving her daughter behind, our heroine lives for fifteen years alone in a cabin in the woods in what can only be described in today’s vernacular as mindfulness. Not Thoreau, as she rarely analyzes her own actions. She lives. Peacefully and quietly. We never know for certain what it is that propels her, but we glimpse her discomfort with modern society and suspect a diagnosis – in the world she left behind, she might be labeled anxious or paranoid – but we see only that she takes in her environs with extreme sensitivity. She hears and smells more acutely, she feels deeply without rationalization. A buddhist without label, empathic to the point that she feels too deeply and thus suffers for others. A woman who needs to be alone, who is suddenly confronted by the daughter she left behind, with her daughter’s justifiable anger and confusion. Can she turn her back on her again? Who is the saner woman? This is a very good novel for those who wish to explore such themes, and extremely well told.

( Courtesy of  Randy Kraft,   199 pages )

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Jane Urquhart, The Underpainter

In Rochester, New York, a seventy-five-year-old artist, Austin Fraser, is creating a new series of paintings recalling the details of his life and of the lives of those individuals who have affected him–his peculiar mother, a young Canadian soldier and china painter, a First World War nurse, the well-known American painter Rockwell Kent, and Sara, a waitress from the wilderness mining settlement of Silver Islet, Ontario, who became Austin’s model and mistress. Spanning more than seven decades, from the turn of the century to the mid-seventies, The Underpainter–in range, in the sheer power of its prose, and in its brilliant depiction of landscape and the geography of imagination–is Jane Urquhart‘s most accomplished novel to date, with one of the most powerful climaxes in contemporary fiction.

( Courtesy of GoodReads,   340 pages )