Though rather too belabored and talky to match the impact of
Smiley's impressive Barn Blind debut (1980), this claustrophobic,
deathbed study of an edgy Des Moines family reaffirms her acute
feel for silent wounds, thwarted affections, and complex domestic
tensions. Ike Robison, 77, is severely ill from heart disease,
staying in bed except for occasional trudgings downstairs - and so
the three 50-ish Robison daughters have come to gather 'round
mother Anna (the novel's central focus) during what seems to be a
deathwatch. But family unity is, hardly the result in the 24 hours
covered here. The daughters - especially handsome, industrious
Claire, who took her late husband's illness "like a pole-vaulter
clearing a two-story house" - urge stubborn, tired Anna to move
"Daddy" into the living-room, to hire a nurse. Claire and
beautiful, cosmopolitan, snobbish Helen continue their everlasting
verbal duel. Fat realtor Susanna murmurously bemoans her fate: no
children, a husband who left her. And when Helen's young daughter
Christine arrives, announcing her imminent divorce, a new subject
is up for group discussion. "Her daughters were so unhappy! Was it
her fault, after all?" So wonders Anna - but the daughters are the
least of her anxieties. She rakes over the past: her strict Mama,
her marriage and life with demanding Ike on a failing ranch, her
20-year refusal to let Ike sleep with her (separate rooms, the
connecting door tied shut with a stocking). She berates herself:
"Why did she fail to rise to the occasion of this illness, every
day? Why did she meet every demand with resentment and reluctance.
. .?" And through the dead-of-night hours - the novel's best
section - the aged couple sleeps hardly at all: Anna is on edge,
especially after a weird phone call (her imagination?); Ike's bed
is re-made again and again; she rebuffs his wanderings into her
room; they bicker and snipe, with an explosion from Anna when Ike
says her long-ago friend Elinor "looked like a piece of beef
jerky." But the next day, before Ike dies, there'll be a tiny
moment - Anna helping Ike in the bathroom - of new closeness: "For
the first time in her life, they overlapped." And brand-new widow
Anna finally looks ahead, having worked through the "rules" and
"demands" of the past. Most of this is quietly splendid, with
plainspoken details, a brooding sense of the house itself, and
un-gussied-up dialogue. Unfortunately, however, as if afraid that
readers will miss the point, Smiley indulges in flat, repetitious
summaries of the feelings involved. And even more marring are the
daughters' speechy debates - which escalate when Christine much too
neatly (Death and Rebirth) discovers that she's pregnant . . and
which often make this novel seem like an old-fashioned, contrived
stage-play. Flawed work, then, but worthy, honest, and - at its
best - wry and sternly moving. (Kirkus Reviews)
In his bedroom upstairs, 77-year-old Ike Robinson is dying. Down in
the living room his wife, Anna, defends the citadel of their
marriage against an ill-considered, albeit loving, invasion by
their three middle-aged daughters and 23-year-old granddaughter. By
the author of A Thousand Acres.
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