Category: Fiction

he 1950’s feel as if they happened about 300 years ago, quainter and further off than the 40’s, 30’s or 20’s; and to English readers (Americans may scarcely even have registered it), the most poignantly distant moment of the decade was the Coronation of Elizabeth II — Richard Dimbleby intoning over the BBC, English hearts still simple enough to be touched by the ancient ceremonial.

A. S. Byatt has set her novel in Coronation year and, at the same time, it really does reach back 300 years. Loaded, often overloaded, with literary and mythological symbols of the Virgin Queen, the story centers on the performance of a play about the first Elizabeth.

Byatt, sister of Margaret Drabble, is less well known than Drabble because she publishes seldom; this is only her third novel. It is as grave, solid, ample as a Yorkshire tea, with deliberate hints of the Northern tradition of Mrs. Gaskell and Charlotte Bronte, even down to having a curate for one of its main characters. While Coronation year and the play are enacted, we watch crucial changes in a family cowed by the self-righteous tantrums of the father: one daughter escapes into marriage; another, the virgin of the title, learns how to have a hard heart; and the schoolboy son goes mad.

Byatt’s portrait of this hypersensitive, schizoid boy, his senses invaded by terrors and visions, holding annihilation at bay by repeating mathematical formulae, is beautifully empathetic. Self-defense through the intellect is practiced by other of her characters, and something of the sort bedevils the author’s own style. She is at her best in bringing her characters alive, and they live on in the mind. But the book is overdecorated with tags and references from Elizabethan literature that smell of the lecture room; her characters quote lines of verse at one another in a way that I thought went out with Dorothy L. Sayers.

But Byatt is essentially a fine, careful and very traditional storyteller. I wish she would write more often.

( Courtesy Of Rosemary Dinnage to The (London) Times Literary Supplement,   428 pages )

Revisiting the Victorian ambience of Possession , Byatt treats her large audience to more extraordinary literary gamesmanship with two intricate novellas. In “Morpho Eugenia” penniless young entomologist William Adamson has just returned from a 10-year expedition in the Amazon. William is taken in by a titled clergyman with scientific pretensions, and soon marries his benefactor’s beautiful daughter. Unable to undertake another Amazon adventure, he studies domestic ant colonies and discovers indecent parallels between the insects and his new family. “The Conjugial Angel” involves a circle of spiritualists, chief among them Alfred Tennyson’s sister Emily, in her youth engaged to Arthur Hallam, the man immortalized in Tennyson’s In Memorium . Emily has been branded faithless for having married years after Hallam’s death (Elizabeth Barrett called her a “disgrace to womanhood”), but she is uncompromising in her pursuit of Hallam’s ghost. As fans will anticipate, Byatt effortlessly exploits the opportunities for pastiche, belletristic flourish and critical commentary. If her symbolism is as excessively upholstered and overdetermined as the narratives of her Victorian models, beneath the padding she sets out a delicate chain of thematic concerns–19th-century tensions between science and faith, erotic currents within families, the nature of marital happiness–and heightens them by juxtaposing the two novellas here. Her easy ventriloquism mocks Victorian excesses even as she uses these same elements to inveigle her readers. Complex and captivating, this fluid volume recasts itself on every page.

( Courtesy of Publishers Weekly,   290 pages )

Winnie would say she’s no trouble. She’s content to let the days go by, minding her own business, bothering no-one. She’d rather not recall the past and, at 72, doesn’t see much point in thinking about the future. But when her closed existence is shattered by a random act of violence, Winnie is catapulted out of her exile. Robbed of everything she owns, she embarks on a journey to track down the thief – but she soon finds that what began as a search for stolen belongings has become the rediscovery of a stolen life.

( Courtesy of GoodReads,   262 pages )

In this muted, measured debut, Powning captures the sorrow of a grieving widow as she revisits the past to heal present-day wounds. For 30 years, Kate’s one constant has been Tom—her husband and best friend. A year after his death, 51-year-old Kate, alone in her lovely Victorian house in the Canadian countryside, is still having trouble acknowledging that he’s gone. Distraction arrives in the form of a number of hatboxes from her grandparents’ attic, full of letters smelling of apples and smoke that take Kate back to the simplicity of her childhood and Shepton, the family’s rambling Connecticut home. But when Kate reads of a family tragedy, she sees a parallel between it and her own sorrow, and she begins to work through her feelings. Meanwhile, she grows close to Gregory, an old family friend who can’t recover from his son’s suicide, though she struggles with her feelings of pity and disgust for him when he makes some clumsy advances. Only a final calamity forces Kate to finally let go of the past and to start living in the present. The novel’s leisurely pace takes some getting used to, but Powning does an excellent job of portraying Kate’s sadness, divulging the tales of her family and focusing on the quiet beauty of her surroundings. Agent, Jackie Kaiser.

( Courtesy of Jackie Kaiser,  Publishers Weekly,   352 pages )

In this stunning and fully independent conclusion to A Great Circle, Reynolds Price tells the complex, moving story of a man’s return home to die of AIDS and of the unexpected effect that his arrival — and his death — has on his family.

Wade Mayfield’s parents are separated, but for the remaining months of his life they and their friends come together to care for Wade with the love they can muster. They are unprepared, however, for the astonishing mystery Wade has prepared to reveal once he is gone — a mystery that initiates the possible reunion of his parents and promises to continue the proud traditions of a complex, multiracial family

( Courtesy of GoodReads,   353 pages )

Here is the second volume of “A Great Circle”, the highly acclaimed Mayfield family trilogy, from one of America’s literary treasures. Though a novel independent from “The Surface of Earth, The Source of Light” continues the saga of the Mayfield family, here focusing on Hutchins Mayfield, whose desire for self-knowledge removes him from his secure existence as a prep school teacher and takes him on a journey to Oxford and Italy to study and write. Hutchins comes back home for a family crisis but ultimately returns to England, where he achieves a maturity that enables him to cope with commitments, abandonments, and the creation of an honest personal agenda.

In “The Source of Light”, Reynolds Price combines gravity and buoyancy, a mythic sense of the past with the mysteries of place, to forge an encompassing portrait of the strange and various world one travels through in the quest for self-fulfillment.

( Courtesy of GoodReads,   318 pages )

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 )

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 )