Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. The aching loneliness of almost every character is subtly and movingly depicted as generations of weak parenting and secrecy take their toll.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Hope Farm is where Silver’s patience with her mother runs out, with explosive results. Then along comes a man named Miller, and Ishtar is swept up in yet another short-lived sexual swoon. “We lived in so many places-and in my memory they’ve merged to form a kind of hazy, overlapping backdrop.” Every time her mother gets a new boyfriend, they’re off to another ramshackle setup, but this time, Ishtar says, they’ll move on by themselves, leaving for an adventure overseas. “It’s hard to remember much from before Hope,” Silver explains. The second thread is the story of a 13-year-old girl named Silver and her young, beautiful mother, Ishtar. Taken in by this woman and her orange-robed spiritual community, the new mother changes her name and disappears from her old life. She decides she’s not going to do it and fortunately has kept the number of a woman she met in a park who told her to call for help anytime. One is the unedited journal of a sexually abused teenager who becomes pregnant and is shipped off by her parents to have her baby in secret and give it up for adoption. The book follows two narrative paths in parallel. Boyle’s Drop City, Lauren Groff’s Arcadia, and other novels about the failures of communal living, with additional connections to Esther Freud’s Hideous Kinky and Ian McEwan’s Atonement. It was the eighties-they were a dying breed.” Frew’s ( House of Sticks, 2011) second novel is an Australian cousin of T.C.
“The crops had failed, the goats were gone, the compost was rotten, but still they stayed, these people.
A hippie commune called Hope Farm offers neither hope nor farming to its bedraggled residents.
0 kommentar(er)
