Thursday
Aug052004
BOOKS: A Rebel's Favorite Writer
Thursday, August 5, 2004 at 10:18PM
Last week, it was plane crashes and legal intrigue with Ira Genberg and Reckless Homicide--are you ready for more? With air disaster, spellbinding novels, and favorite authors on the brain, and having no plans to fly anywhere this summer, this week I'm going to share with you one of my all-time, most-favorite fiction writers. Ever.
By Anita Shreve
(Back Bay Books/Little, Brown & Co (paperback), 1999)
An OPRAH'S Book Club Selection
Another plane crash, more suspicious circumstances, and a grieving widow left to figure it all out--how well did she really know her own husband? A pilot, yes. Husband and father, yes--they had a good marriage and a fifteen-year-old daughter--but there is much, much more to the story. The Pilot's Wife is about tragedy, grief, strength and survival--and then it gets REALLY good...
Anita Shreve is a prolific writer, consistently extraordinary in her mastery of complex, multi-faceted characters, fascinating situations, and unusual circumstances--there's always something else going on, some twist, just below the surface. And yet, the thing that makes her so GOOD is that all of her books are so different from each other--time, circumstances, and characters often hundreds of years apart. And yet (again), at times there are parallels, threads woven in here and there--glimpses of one book in another: characters, elements, especially setting. I LOVE that!
I finally clued in to the thread between The Pilot's Wife and two of my other favorites:
Fortune's Rocks
By Anita Shreve
(Little, Brown & Co (paperback), 1999)
Set in 1899, a fifteen-year-old girl from a prominent family on summer holiday gets caught up in an affair with a friend of her father's, a much-older man, a doctor who is married and has four young children. You would expect to be horrified by this situation, but you won't be able to put this book down.
Sea Glass
By Anita Shreve
(Back Bay Books/Little, Brown & Co (paperback), 2002)
Set in 1929, a young newlywed couple acquires an old house on the beach in the Northeast--at Fortune's Rocks--an old house with a history of its own that is just barely mentioned: about a doctor and a young girl, a scandal, a house converted to a dormitory for young unwed mothers...the characters in Sea Glass have no relationship to the characters in Fortune's Rocks, much less to The Pilot's Wife, whose home and refuge it is 70 years later--and yet the house, the very same setting, becomes pivotal in a completely different novel of love and disappointment, betrayal and loss during the Great Depression, involving political turmoil, labor strife, and the rise of the unions in the industrial mills of the Northeast.
There is a short interview with Anita Shreve, who is reputedly quite reclusive, at the end of Sea Glass. In it, she talks about the idea that one house can hold so many stories, from all the different people who have lived there. In response to a question about the house at Fortune's Rocks: "...an old house might have many stories to tell. Ten or eleven women, each with her own life, her own story, could be imagined to have lived in the house that was featured in The Pilot's Wife and Fortune's Rocks. For example--say, a story about a woman who lived there during World War II, or during the Great Depression...The novel that resulted is Sea Glass."
Enjoy Anita Shreve--start with these three and we'll re-visit some of her other great books later!
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The Pilot's Wife
By Anita Shreve
(Back Bay Books/Little, Brown & Co (paperback), 1999)
An OPRAH'S Book Club Selection
Another plane crash, more suspicious circumstances, and a grieving widow left to figure it all out--how well did she really know her own husband? A pilot, yes. Husband and father, yes--they had a good marriage and a fifteen-year-old daughter--but there is much, much more to the story. The Pilot's Wife is about tragedy, grief, strength and survival--and then it gets REALLY good...
Anita Shreve is a prolific writer, consistently extraordinary in her mastery of complex, multi-faceted characters, fascinating situations, and unusual circumstances--there's always something else going on, some twist, just below the surface. And yet, the thing that makes her so GOOD is that all of her books are so different from each other--time, circumstances, and characters often hundreds of years apart. And yet (again), at times there are parallels, threads woven in here and there--glimpses of one book in another: characters, elements, especially setting. I LOVE that!
I finally clued in to the thread between The Pilot's Wife and two of my other favorites:
Fortune's Rocks
By Anita Shreve
(Little, Brown & Co (paperback), 1999)
Set in 1899, a fifteen-year-old girl from a prominent family on summer holiday gets caught up in an affair with a friend of her father's, a much-older man, a doctor who is married and has four young children. You would expect to be horrified by this situation, but you won't be able to put this book down.
Sea Glass
By Anita Shreve
(Back Bay Books/Little, Brown & Co (paperback), 2002)
Set in 1929, a young newlywed couple acquires an old house on the beach in the Northeast--at Fortune's Rocks--an old house with a history of its own that is just barely mentioned: about a doctor and a young girl, a scandal, a house converted to a dormitory for young unwed mothers...the characters in Sea Glass have no relationship to the characters in Fortune's Rocks, much less to The Pilot's Wife, whose home and refuge it is 70 years later--and yet the house, the very same setting, becomes pivotal in a completely different novel of love and disappointment, betrayal and loss during the Great Depression, involving political turmoil, labor strife, and the rise of the unions in the industrial mills of the Northeast.
There is a short interview with Anita Shreve, who is reputedly quite reclusive, at the end of Sea Glass. In it, she talks about the idea that one house can hold so many stories, from all the different people who have lived there. In response to a question about the house at Fortune's Rocks: "...an old house might have many stories to tell. Ten or eleven women, each with her own life, her own story, could be imagined to have lived in the house that was featured in The Pilot's Wife and Fortune's Rocks. For example--say, a story about a woman who lived there during World War II, or during the Great Depression...The novel that resulted is Sea Glass."
Enjoy Anita Shreve--start with these three and we'll re-visit some of her other great books later!