Rating: ***
Tags: Fiction, General, Literary, Family & Relationships, Contemporary Women, Family Life, Domestic Fiction, Sagas, Death; Grief; Bereavement, Grief, Weddings, Traffic Fatalities, Social Conflict, Maine, Lang:en
Summary
Pat Conroy Reviews
Red Hook Road
Pat Conroy is the author of nine previous books:
The Boo,
The Water is Wide,
The Great Santini,
The Lords of Discipline,
The Prince of Tides,
Beach Music,
My Losing Season,
The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes of My Life, and
South of Broad. His newest book,
My Life In Books, will be published in September.
He lives in Fripp Island, South Carolina. Read his review
of
Red Hook Road:
In her latest novel,
Red Hook Road, Ayelet Waldman has nailed the
indelible mark that the state of Maine leaves on all visitors
who fall for its subtle, insinuating glamour.
Red Hook Road is a terrific novel, and might even be
a great one. The structure of the book seems perfect to me;
the first sentence sets up and readies us for the immense
powers of the last one. It tells the stories of two families
as different as the Montagues and the Capulets, but with the
same tragic and irreversible destines playing out around
them. The hardscrabble, working-class Hewins are native
Mainers, the kind of family that keeps Maine vibrant during
the cold months when the summer people return to their
big-city homes. The Kimmelbrods are a sophisticated Jewish
family from Manhattan; they are as cultured and passionate as
the Hewins are no-nonsense and taciturn, as taciturn as
lichens growing on the rocks of a church garden. Jane Hewins
is a quintessential woman of Maine with an unviable sense of
self and a home-bound integrity that could earn her a place
on a Maine license plate along with a moose, a lobster, or a
loon. Her big-city counterpart is Iris Copaken, a character
who represents the highest level of Jewish culture. Iris has
been vacationing with her family in Red Hook since birth, and
Jane Hewins has cleaned the Copaken’s summer house for
many years. The novel begins when Jane’s admirable son
marries Iris’ delectable daughter; and great storm
clouds form on the far horizon as Down East Maine meets the
Upper East side in a glorious clash of the Titans. Ayelet Waldman’s prose style is lovely and fresh.
There is a brilliant scene that I’ve returned to again
and again: The great violinist, Emil Kimmelbrod, finds the
undiscovered talent of a small girl, Samantha Phelps, and
brings out her instinctive mastery of rhythm, modulation, and
perfect pitch. With language and example, Ayelet teaches me
everything I didn’t know and can never know about
music. It was like discovering a lost part of my life where
I’m not only untalented, but unteachable. Each
encounter of Kimmelbrod and Samantha in the book was exciting
for me. Had I not read this book, I wouldn’t have
understood that I’ve never really "heard" classical
music before. The structure of
Red Hook Road is so perfect that I didn’t
initially notice the sacred reverence for the beauty of wood
both families share. The people of coastal Maine are
aficionados of wooden boats, and their harbors fill up with
boats that perform the same service as the highest works of
art. The same joy of perfect woodwork manifests itself in
Kimmelbrod as he cradles his Dembovski or considers the
famous violins of Giussupe Guarneri del Gesu. You learn in
this book that there is a strange kinship in the mahogany
fittings of yachts and the lacquered pear wood of
violins--_Red Hook Road_ is an intricate dance between art
and nature, between foreignness and belonging, between still
waters and storm. There are love stories being told all over this book, and
like all great love stories, these are volatile and enduring
and bright with astonishment. These characters now take up
residence in the city I’ve built out of the books I
love. This book made me happy, and happy to be alive. It took
me out of my home on the coast of South Carolina, placed me
in the town along
Red Hook Road, and changed me the way good books
always do.
Ayelet Waldman on
Red Hook Road
There comes a moment at every literary event, a moment
every author dreads, when the lights go up and the Q&A
starts. The vast majority of the Q is fine (I can’t
speak for the A, you’ll have to be the judge). What
book am I reading now, when did I first want to become a
writer, how do my children feel about the title of my last
book. I like those Qs. I like especially the Qs that
haven’t been asked before, the ones that give me a
chance to depart from my practiced answers. I’m not as
fond of the Q that begins with some version of, "I hated this
book, but not as much as I loathed your last one," but I can
handle that. (I find it usually helps to agree with the
person and to suggest alternatives. Ian McEwan never
disappoints.) The Q I loath and despise, the Q every single
writer I know loathes and despises, is this one: Where, the reader asks, do you get your ideas? It’s a simple question, and my usual response is a
kind of helpless, "I don’t know." But I do know.
I’m just embarrassed to tell you. I get my ideas from
you, or from your mother, or from someone else I run across
to whom something bizarre or sad has happened, someone whose
life is miserable, but in an interesting way. "Write What You
Know," goes the old adage, but once you’ve written
about what an unloved geek and freak you were in high school
(and every writer I know claims to have been the most unhappy
teenager who ever lived. Where were these people when I was
sitting alone at the lunch table at George Washington Jr.
High? I’d like to know. Couldn’t we have been
sitting together?), once you’ve mined the exciting tale
of your grandmother/grandfather’s immigration to
America from Russia/Italy/China/Vietnam, once you’ve
spent an entire novel complaining about how much it sucks to
have to wake up in the middle of the night with the baby,
then what? I’ll tell you what. Other people’s misfortune.
That’s where we get those ideas that inspire us (and,
we hope, you). Most writers spend their lives standing a
little apart from the crowd, watching and listening and
hoping to catch that tiny hint of despair, that sliver of
malice, that makes them think, Aha, here is the story. My new novel,
Red Hook Road, began many years ago as a short
article in the newspaper. A bride and a groom (or was it the
groom and the best man?) were killed on their way from the
church to the reception, when a speeding car smashed into
their limousine. The horror of that happening on that day, at
that moment, when you are about to embark on a completely new
life, where everything is possible and the future is all that
is on your mind... that stuck with me for years. I’d
think of it time and again, as anyone would. A normal person thinks about that tragedy, and maybe gets
sad all over again. A writer thinks of it and wonders, "Can I
use this?" Until one day, you can, and you do.
--Ayelet Waldman
(Photo © Reenie Raschke) Waldman (_Love and Other Impossible Pursuits_) delivers a
dense story of irreparable loss that tracks two families
across four summers. After John Tetherly and Becca Copaken
die in a freak car accident an hour after their wedding,
their families are left to bridge stark class and cultural
divides, and eventually forge deep-rooted bonds thanks to the
twin deities of love and music. Becca's family is well off,
from New York, and summers in Red Hook, Maine, a small
coastal town where John's blue-collar single mother, Jane,
cleans houses for a living. They interact, awkwardly, over
how to bury the couple, the staging of an anniversary party,
and over Jane's adopted niece, whose amazing musical talent
makes a connection to Becca's ailing grandfather, a virtuoso
violinist, who agrees to give her lessons. Becca's younger
sister, Ruthie, a Fulbright scholar, meanwhile, falls in love
with John's younger brother, Matt, the first Tetherly to go
to college, before he drops out to work at a boatyard and
finish restoring his brother's sailboat, which he plans on
sailing to the Caribbean. Though Waldman is often guilty of
overwriting here, the narrative is well crafted, and each of
the characters comes fully to life.
(July)
Amazon.com Review
From Publishers Weekly
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