Cath
Hubbard has gone through two husbands, and even in liberal San Francisco, two
marital failures are frowned upon. Cath is hardly Elizabeth Taylor, after
all. With all her kids now grown and mostly all away from home, Cath's
life has apparently settled into the course that it will take for the rest of
her life. But then an event happens - her despised and aloof aunt, Rue,
has died, and Cath has inherited her Grandmother Georgia's house in Vermont.
Cath decides to give up the day job for a while and to settle in Vermont.
Memories inevitably flood back to her, as Cath lived here herself when young in
two spells. Here was where she learnt to drive, where she first made love
with her first boyfriend. Cath originally chose to live there after her
mother had a breakdown, and then she again chooses the comfort of her
grandparents' house when her mother finally committed suicide. As Georgia
herself notes, she and Cath were orphaned at pretty much the same age.
However, Georgia had chosen to remain in the parental home, living with her
father, rather than take the shelter offered by her own grandmother. After
the turmoil of her second divorce, Cath reflects how she always used to think
that her grandparents had the perfect marriage, ignoring the occasional
strained tone amongst her hosts when she lived there as a teenager. To
Cath, her grandparents seem to have lived in a less complex world, a world
where ties where only broken by incurable disease. Indeed, her
grandfather was her grandmother's doctor, and her great-grandmother's doctor
before that, a veteran of the First World War and the great flu pandemic.
Dr. Holbrooke first encounters Georgia when he ministers to her cancerous
mother, to little effect - all he can do is to ease her pain.
Georgia seems unaffected by the long, drawn-out death of her mother.
Indeed, when her mother dies, her burdens are actually lifted, despite the fact
that she still has to look after her younger siblings and her father.
However, such deaths are supposed to be the most stressful for the family, and
whatever else it means, it leads to Georgia living quite a separate life from that
of her peers. She retains a kind of bold innocence. One huge
difference between the lives of Georgia and Cath is the medical progress that
has been made in between. When Cath comes down with a fluey cold
shortly after her arrival in Vermont, although she is forced to remain in bed
and take copious amounts of aspirin and fluids, she knows that she is in no
danger of dying, and besides, she has a supportive friend who brings her soup
and flowers. Georgia, however, when Dr. Holbrooke diagnoses her with tuberculosis,
is almost immediately whisked off to the local sanatorium. At 19, she is
quite innocent, having only gently flirted with her first boyfriends.
Life in the sanatorium is seen to be so much more precious, and therefore, much
more worthwhile living to the full... Georgia later tells Cath that she
felt like she had been transported to the future.
As Cath conducts her internal debate as to whether she should re-invent herself
again, she ponders on the peculiar similarities her grandmother's life had with
her own. She is helped in this task by the discovery of her grandmother's
journals and accounts. Although these seem to be impersonal jottings
concerning the weather, Cath soon begins to piece together, along with
previous, innocent seeming conversations with her grandmother when she herself
was a child, the story of the dark secrets at the heart of her grandparents'
marriage. Sue Miller powerfully uses the metaphor of 'the world below',
the vision that Cath has of a sunken town at the bottom of a Vermont reservoir,
to chip away at these hidden secrets. Should Cath finally settle for life
with Samuel Eliasson, the older man who reminds her so much of her own
grandfather? Or should she just slowly drift away with the tide?
This is a well-written and powerful story. Sue Miller is an expert mason
- the quite complex structure comes togetheer naturally in her hands, and teases
the reader by spinning out a couple of threads that you have just got to get to
the root of. She is also quite startlingly frank about sex, lust, and
desire - but she is also very true about these fundamentals. It would
appear that Sue Miller has deservedly won quite a big reputation in America - I
suspect that it will not be too long before she gets such a big audience here
too.
Authortrek rating:
8/10
Visit
our Sue Miller page
The
following is a series of links related to the novel:
"the
fate of Jerry, of Abbie and Rap" - Chapter 5 page 65 - aka Abbie Hoffman,
Jerry Rubin, and H. Rap Brown
"Aura
Lee" - Chapter 6 page 87 - read the lyrics
"Tillie's
Punctured Romance"- Chapter 7 page 110 - is considered to be the first
feature length comedy. It was the last film Charlie Chaplin made under a
director other than himself
"Edith Wharton" - Chapter 8 page 129 - read about the life of
the author of “Ethan Frome”, set in a stark New England
"Shoo
fly, don't bother me" - Chapter 10 page 184 - read the lyrics
"Mountain
Mills" - Chapter 16 page 270 - this town really is beneath the Harriman
Reservoir in Vermont
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