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Dated homecoming tale
By Tom De Haven |
April 24, 2011, Sunday
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Print Edition
THE three siblings who jointly narrate Eleanor Brown's likable but sometimes careless first novel, "The Weird Sisters," seem incarnated from birth-order paradigms in a "Sociology of the Family" textbook. Rose, the oldest, is a fault-finding control freak. Bean, the middle sister, is a promiscuous attention seeker. Cordy, the youngest, simply refuses to grow up. Raised in the idyllic town of Barnwell, Ohio, daughters of loving if distracted parents (Dad lives, breathes and never stops quoting Shakespeare, which he teaches at the local college; Mom prepares delicious if unreliable meals and reads voraciously), the quarrelsome Andreas sisters, as full-grown women, have become self-reproaching, self-described "failures." When their mother is told she has breast cancer, they move back to their childhood home, avowedly out of concern but really in search of safe haven.
For Rose, a professor of mathematics, the news of her mother's illness comes almost as a relief: "Thank God, a purpose. An excuse to be needed." It's also a good pretext for staying in Ohio, her comfort zone, rather than relocating to England, where her fiance has been offered a visiting professorship at Oxford. For each of her two sisters - Cordy floating from place to place "like a dandelion seed," Bean living in New York, caring only about "clothes and designer martinis and how best to pick up and bed an investment banker" - the family emergency coincides with a personal crisis. Cordy has just learned that she's pregnant. Bean has been fired, though implausibly not arrested, for embezzling "a great deal of money" from the law firm where she has worked for several years.
But despite a promising if shopworn premise and the perceptive ways Brown illustrates just how quickly a homecoming can turn three independent women back into "the girls," the ensuing plot seldom rises above the predictable and the romantic.
Their mother's grave illness is given just enough attention (chemo, surgery, radiation, a life-threatening blood clot) to keep readers mindful of it, though never so much to distract us for too long from the sisters' fretful solipsism, which can sound like the overblown introduction to an old-time radio melodrama: "Would Bean always be chasing one man or another, Cordy eternally chasing some shadow of a person she might never become, and Rose herself chasing some shadow of the ways things were Supposed to Be?" You can almost hear the studio organ rumbling.
First-person-plural point of view notwithstanding, there's a dated quality to Brown's novel (in which hair is likely to be called tresses, books tomes and bars watering holes; where people pad softly, blink back tears, bark laughs) and a striking absence of contemporary references.
Which is a shame, because "The Weird Sisters" can be entertaining, and Eleanor Brown's neurotic, floundering characters have the potential to be spirited company. But their world is one you can never entirely believe in. You can live inside it comfortably, listening and watching, with your attention never wandering - but with your eyes sometimes, unpreventably, rolling.
For Rose, a professor of mathematics, the news of her mother's illness comes almost as a relief: "Thank God, a purpose. An excuse to be needed." It's also a good pretext for staying in Ohio, her comfort zone, rather than relocating to England, where her fiance has been offered a visiting professorship at Oxford. For each of her two sisters - Cordy floating from place to place "like a dandelion seed," Bean living in New York, caring only about "clothes and designer martinis and how best to pick up and bed an investment banker" - the family emergency coincides with a personal crisis. Cordy has just learned that she's pregnant. Bean has been fired, though implausibly not arrested, for embezzling "a great deal of money" from the law firm where she has worked for several years.
But despite a promising if shopworn premise and the perceptive ways Brown illustrates just how quickly a homecoming can turn three independent women back into "the girls," the ensuing plot seldom rises above the predictable and the romantic.
Their mother's grave illness is given just enough attention (chemo, surgery, radiation, a life-threatening blood clot) to keep readers mindful of it, though never so much to distract us for too long from the sisters' fretful solipsism, which can sound like the overblown introduction to an old-time radio melodrama: "Would Bean always be chasing one man or another, Cordy eternally chasing some shadow of a person she might never become, and Rose herself chasing some shadow of the ways things were Supposed to Be?" You can almost hear the studio organ rumbling.
First-person-plural point of view notwithstanding, there's a dated quality to Brown's novel (in which hair is likely to be called tresses, books tomes and bars watering holes; where people pad softly, blink back tears, bark laughs) and a striking absence of contemporary references.
Which is a shame, because "The Weird Sisters" can be entertaining, and Eleanor Brown's neurotic, floundering characters have the potential to be spirited company. But their world is one you can never entirely believe in. You can live inside it comfortably, listening and watching, with your attention never wandering - but with your eyes sometimes, unpreventably, rolling.
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