Lively's eighth novel, superior in delicacy of tone and craft,
views a contemporary "brutal world" of rampaging greed through the
gentle, spare, vulnerable lives of a sister and brother who persist
in not taking account of its dangers or excesses. Horrid, bullying
Dorothy, mother of Helen, 52, Edward, 49, and Louise 43, has at
last expired at age eighty. Dorothy's death, muses Helen, who lives
with brother Edward in Greystones - the moldering huge house that
Dorothy has left to a nephew in order to save taxes - has left a
"black hole." From the unkempt garden to the kitchen (redolent of
rotting dishcloths), Helen, a part-time librarian in the Cotswold
village, constantly meets Mother's punishing presence. Both Helen
and Edward, a mild-mannered schoolteacher and rabid
conservationist, are dowdy, honest as rain, and quietly shelter
within themselves years of hurt and anxiety. In the meantime,
sister Louise - stressed by career and marriage and her two
teen-agers (to Helen's amusement, the teens were "black-leathered
and slung about with chains" at the funeral) - urges improving
comforts at ill-heated Greystones. But Helen and Edward agree: "so
far as money and possessions are concerned, we're at a more
primitive stage than the rest. We're not interested in surplus."
But Helen and Edward are about to become victims of disastrously
belated releases of desires and yearnings. Both will survive loss,
fear, and horror - to attain what Helen recognizes as "an
interesting sense of the future. A sense that things can be done:
by me, by Edward." And the magnetic "black hole" that was the dead
Dorothy is no more. An exquisitely patterned and witty tribute to
pacific souls indecently victimized - who "make do" firmly through
psychic crises in a world of "making it." (Kirkus Reviews)
A domineering old woman dies in a Cotswold village. Her death "releases" her two middle-aged unmarried children - a spinster librarian and a nature-loving schoolmaster - to make their lives.
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