Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2400119 in Books
• Published on: 2006
• Format: Import
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Customer Reviews

"I have been going over old memories."
In four seasonal, connected stories, Markovitz dissects the internal lives of his four protagonists, connected by the threads of family, occupation and acquaintance, revealing the subtleties of complicated father-daughter relationships and the way people maneuver around private prejudices and selfish mistakes. Amy Bostick ("Fall") is in New York for a teaching position after four years of college; she feels that her father is sending her out to live the life he failed to experience; only forty-seven, he has begun a slide into middle age, with false teeth, thinning hair and a growing paunch. As her younger brother achieves his own belated successes, Amy senses her pride of place slipping, her life a footnote rather than the center of attention. When her family comes to New York for Thanksgiving, Amy anticipates sharing the old with the new, only to learn that expectations breed regret.

When Howard Peasbody ("Winter") discovers he has a daughter by a woman from years before, he is astounded. Thoroughly gay, his younger lover ensconced at home, Howard thought only to meet this old flame and reminisce. As she speaks, Howard reassesses his response to her news, considering how he has manipulated facts to fit his take on the world, creating a comfort zone that is possibly unrealistic, "it occurred to him once more that he might be looking through a distorted lens". Practicing "the indifference of control", Howard reasserts his will, hoping to retreat from this potential vulnerability. His self-deception conceals an astonishing amount of self-destruction, his cold heart seeping like ice to separate him from his feelings.

Stuart Englander ("Spring"), another teacher, has reached a plateau where everything is hopelessly banal but for his students, one in particular. Fascinated by the brown-haired Rachel Kranz, Stuart's early morning imagination is fixated involuntarily on her, his wife's bulk sleeping beside him. The marriage, retaining little animation, balances on intuition: "Childlessness had kept them childish". Occasional tears reduce Stuart to what is left of his "mineral bitterness", awakened by spring only to be confronted by his own failures. "Summer" features Rachel Kranz, the object of Stuart's desire, who has her own problems, caught in her parents' divorce, forming a self image that collapses with each new doubt. Coming to terms with a loss that will alter everything familiar, albeit troubling or distasteful, Rachel is desperate for comfort before being thrust into an indifferent world.

Markovitz's characters are full of the slight, brittle judgments we all make but keep to ourselves and it is this poignancy that resonates through the stories, each season a revelation. Precisely drawn, revealing the barest slices of their lives, these people are exposed to the marrow, blindsided by their flaws: Given the choice "he wouldn't have chosen her. So this was the stuff he was made of." While these characters are, for the most part, unlikable, they remain utterly fascinating, thanks to the author's talent for shaping their universally human flaws. Grounded in academia, the protagonists are both victims and beneficiaries of their intellects, yearning and self-defeating, on the cusp of change but beyond ambitious gestures. Luan Gaines/ 2005.

Vain effort
It is easy to assign quite a few positive literary judgements to Markovits' novel: the text is carefully constructed, the author is well-read, the images are well-chosen and so on. Still, he doesn't manage to captivate neither the reader nor his imagination. The points Markovits has to make are not trivial, but they aren't new either. As a consequence, the whole text appears to be a literary "etude" rather than a work of art.
The characters are passed on from chapter to chapter - each a short story in itself. The spotlights from each form the "whole picture" in the end. But due to the novel's fine but rather artificial construction, the detail spent on character description is finally lost: all is artifice without live.
Through Markovits' need for controlling his characters as well as his style, the whole text seems strangely out-of-date, as if he had written it along the rules set down in a creative-writing-guide from the fifties.

Prose at its best
This is not a novel (or series of four stories) for the casual reader. I cannot add more about the content of the novel than what is so well stated in the first review (above). But I would like to make a suggestion to the reader who might find the first pages difficult to get into. Read it aloud to catch the subtle syntax. Don't let Mr. Markovits' elaborated sentences put you off until you tune your ear to the artistry of his brilliant prose. These are brilliantly conceived characters, delicately handled.