This carefully observed family story rings true to life, but a larger purpose in Laura’s 15-year chronicle remains elusive. The surprising, poignant and beautifully composed final scene - a rare moment of true feeling - reveals what has been mostly missing until then. The book might have benefited from being shorter it is difficult to sustain narrative momentum through what is mainly a record of mundane and foreseeable experience, especially given that neither Laura nor Emma is possessed of a singular personality or a particularly original or insightful mind. Connell’s 1959 classic study of repressed WASP womanhood, is pleasantly readable and enlivened by flashes of sardonic humor. Greathead’s debut, which often has the feel of an updated version of “Mrs. Not even her love for her child feels particularly intense. About sex: “I’ve lived my whole life without it,” she assures an incredulous date after he has trouble performing, “and I’ve been perfectly happy.” Laura is an enigmatic character, curiously lacking not only in ordinary amorousness but in any significant dreams or ambitions.
The years unfold in a series of vignettes, with Emma moving through the stages of a typical, if fatherless, privileged urban childhood, and Laura remaining single and celibate and seemingly O.K. Though she disdains much about her own social class and hopes to instill in her daughter, Emma, more ethical values than the ones with which she herself was raised, Laura remains tethered to her family both financially and emotionally. When she finds herself pregnant after a one-night stand, Laura decides to keep the baby. In her 30s, Laura works as a wedding coordinator - of all things, considering that marriage has never appealed to her - at the Library, a museum that was once the home of her robber baron great-grandfather.
“She was not a romantically or sexually inclined person,” we are told at the start of this novel spanning 15 years in the life of a seventh-generation Manhattanite named Laura.
0 kommentar(er)
