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Summary
Summary
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
In this luminous story of family life--the first novel by Susan Minot, author of the highly acclaimed Evening --the seven Vincent children follow their Catholic mother to Mass and spend Thanksgiving with their father's aging parents who come from a world of New England priviledge. As they grow older, they meet with the perplexing lives of adults. Susan Minot writes with delicacy and a tremendous gift for the details that decorate domestic life, and when tragedy strikes she beautifully mines the children's tenderness for each other, and their aching guardianship of what they have.
Author Notes
Susan Minot, Novelist Susan Minot was born in Boston, Massachusetts and grew up in Manchester-by-the-Sea. She studied writing and painting at Brown University and received an MFA in writing from Columbia University. She published short stories in Grand Street and The New Yorker, which led to an offer for a novel. Minot has also been a Greenpeace activist, a carpenter and a bookseller.
Minot's first novel, "Monkeys," took nine stories about the Vincent family and combined them to make up the semi-autobiographical novel. It won the Prix Femina Etranger in France in 1987. The Vincent's are a New England family of seven children, a Catholic mother and a Brahmin background father. The story covers twelve years of their lives and tells of a tragic accident that alters their lives. Her second novel, "Lust & Other Stories," is a collection about artists and journalists living in New York City. It examines the relations between men and women in their twenties and thirties, and the difficulty they have coming together and breaking apart. "Folly" takes place in Boston, during the 1920's to 1930's, and tells the story of a woman with a strict Brahmin background having the choice of a husband being the determining factor of her life. "Evening" is the story of Ann Lord on her deathbed. She relives a weekend love affair with Harris Arden, the greatest love of her life, in great detail, while her children stand by her believing her mind is blank.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
You can hear the voices of the masters--the descriptive economy of Hemingway, the imaged delicacy of Virginia Woolf, and, above all, the informing echo of J.D. Salinger (darkness and breakdown lurking just under a middle-class things-as-usual surface)--in these spare, carefully wrought, and often moving stories. A rather well-off family in Massachusetts with seven children (the ""monkeys"" of the title) has a father who drinks too much, a mother who dies in a car accident, and a future that somehow must be lived. In ""Hiding,"" earliest of these chronological pieces, mother and children ""hide"" from Dad (in an upstairs closet) only to find, rather shakenly, that he doesn't come look for them, but turns on the TV. ""Thanksgiving Day"" shows grandparents entering senility and despair after lives that were once, it seems, exotic and rich. ""Allowance"" takes the family to a Bermuda vacation, where Dad is worred about ""things at the bank,"" drinks too much, empties a glass of water over his head at the restaurant table. ""Wildflowers,"" tugging heartstrings to the danger point, shows the death of an infant, the birth of another. ""Party Blues,"" the one real failure in the volume, tackles adolescent love, inflates it beyond what it can bear, and falls flat. Dad's drinking is handled with a similar overdramatization in ""The Navigator,"" as is, but more forgivably, a son's acting out of grief in ""Accident."" ""Wedlock"" (beautifully) sketches the first Christmas after the mother's death; ""Thorofare"" is the scattering of her ashes at sea. The risk of a mere fashionableness is here, in the peculiarly ""literary"" quality of aesthetic contentedness while studying, purportedly, the manifestations and effects of half-nameless but pervasive anxiety and fear. Much, though, in the stories is tone-perfect, and much, escaping convention, will bring moments of recognition to readers, and feeling. Four pieces have appeared in Grand Street, three in The New Yorker. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Minot chronicles the family life of Gus and Rosie Vincent and their seven children, dubbed ``monkeys'' by their mother. Rosie, or ``Mum,'' is the most vibrant character, creating a secure home for her children as she tries to mask her husband's alcholism and counter his withdrawal from the family. Minot has a fine eye for detail and a talent for creating tension through half-revealed clues in dialogue. However, because the book is very short, involves many characters, and spans roughly 13 years, the development of other characters is not satisfying. The chapters are rather disparate, the first, in fact, having a different narrator than the others. The final chapter, ``Thorofare,'' was included in The Best American Short Stories of 1984 and is perhaps the strongest section, providing a moving ending to an otherwise uneven novel. Lucinda Ann Peck, Learning Design Associates, Gahanna, Ohio (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
