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Summary
Summary
From bestselling author Cathleen Schine comes Fin & Lady, a wise, clever story of New York in the '60s.
It's 1964. Eleven-year-old Fin and his glamorous, worldly, older half sister, Lady, have just been orphaned, and Lady, whom Fin hasn't seen in six years, is now his legal guardian and his only hope. That means Fin is uprooted from a small dairy farm in rural Connecticut to Greenwich Village, smack in the middle of the swinging '60s. He soon learns that Lady-giddy, careless, urgent, and obsessed with being free-is as much his responsibility as he is hers.
So begins Fin & Lady , the lively, spirited new novel by Cathleen Schine, the author of the bestselling The Three Weissmanns of Westport . Fin and Lady lead their lives against the background of the '60s, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War-Lady pursued by ardent, dogged suitors, Fin determined to protect his impulsive sister from them and from herself.
From a writer The New York Times has praised as "sparkling, crisp, clever, deft, hilarious, and deeply affecting," Fin & Lady is a comic, romantic love story: the story of a brother and sister who must form their own unconventional family in increasingly unconventional times.
Author Notes
Author Cathleen Schine was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1953. She received a BA from Barnard College in 1976. She is both a novelist and a freelance writer. Two of her novels, The Love Letters and Rameau's Niece, were made into movies. She has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and Family Circle. She currently lives in New York City.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Schine's new novel (after Alice in Bed) is an entertaining, sometimes perplexing exploration of family bonds and bondage. When Fin is orphaned at the age of 11, Lady, his half-sister, takes him in, pulling him away from the dairy farm in rural Connecticut to the Greenwich Village of the mid-1960s. Lady has always been a shining figure to Fin, who was too young to understand the falling-out she had with their father. Now, Fin and Lady form an unconventional family, set against a tumultuous political and social climate. At times the novel has echoes of Auntie Mame; at others, Dawn Powell. The narrator's voice is used so sparingly as to intrude when it is used, and the reader gets ahead of the story in figuring out who this shadowy figure is in the tale. The bond between Fin and Lady is strong, but the story itself breaks little new ground and doesn't reveal anything new about the era or the longings of those experiencing it. Schine writes lively dialogue and excels at sensory detail, especially early on, before the plot becomes predictable, as the novel wavers precariously between satiric comedy-of-manners and something more serious. Agent: Molly Friedrich, Friedrich Agency. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
In her newest, about a young boy raised by his madcap half sister, Schine (The Three Wiessmanns of Westport, 2010, etc.) joins the spate of recent authors attempting to capture the zeitgeist of the 1960s. In 1964, after 11-year-old Fin's mother dies, he leaves the Connecticut farm where he's lived since his father's death to live in Manhattan with his new guardian, his father's daughter from his first marriage. Although she is Fin's only living relative, the last time they were together was six years earlier, when he went with his parents to Capri, where Lady had run away to avoid a socially acceptable marriage. Now 24, Lady is a mix of Auntie Mame and Holly Golightly--beautiful, effervescent and emotionally wounded. Whether carefree or careless, she is luckily extremely rich. She moves Fin into a hip but far from shabby Greenwich Village brownstone and enrolls him in a progressive school without desks or grading. She throws wild parties, drives a convertible, roots for the Mets and dabbles in leftist politics. She also puts Fin in charge of finding her a suitable husband. She has three suitors: Tyler, the fiance she jilted at the altar as a pregnant 18-year-old, has become the still besotted if bitter lawyer in charge of Fin's financial estate; handsome, not-too-bright jock Jack's appeal lies in his preppy shallowness; then there is Fin's choice, Biffi, a Hungarian Jew who survived World War II to become an art dealer of genuine kindness and wit. But the deep-seated sorrow peaking up through Biffi's charm scares Lady off. Loved by all three men, she's unable to love anyone except Fin and their black housekeeper, Mable, a character who defies conventional stereotypes and thus personifies the upheavals in the decade's civil rights movement. Then she returns to Capri and discovers the joy and danger of being in love herself. Schine offers up a bittersweet lemon souffl of family love and romantic passion.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
"A BOY in a world of selfish, crazy, violent, colorful adults" - that's how precocious Fin Hadley describes "Treasure Island" and "Manchild in the Promised Land," two books he happens to be reading in "Fin & Lady," Cathleen Schine's bittersweet elegy for Greenwich Village in the 1960s. It's also a pretty good characterization of Schine's vivid comic novel itself, and of the unconventional adventures that Fin (no relation, we are specifically told, to Huck) finds himself living. Fin was "named on a whim" for the "three bright white letters" at the end of the movie "Les Enfants du Paradis." His father, Hugo, an irascible lawyer, was hoping, rightly as it turned out, that Fin would be "the last of his children." Hugo has a beautiful daughter, named Lady, by a previous wife, and he's convinced that "she's no lady" but rather, decidedly, a tramp. Like a runaway bride in a '30s screwball comedy, Lady jilts a respectable lawyer at the altar and bolts for Capri, where Hugo drags his reluctant family, including 5-year-old Fin, to retrieve her. Shortly thereafter, Hugo, "that enormous, growling reality," and Fin's kindly mother, Lydia, die in grim succession. Gone too are Fin's grandparents, proprietors of a dairy farm in Connecticut where fatherless Fin spends some pastoral years amid the ruminative cows. At age 11 - "too old for a nap, too young for a drink" - he's left in the not-so-reliable hands of his 24-year-old half sister, his "guardian" for better or worse. The brilliant first sentence of the novel packs his sense of abandonment into 13 poignant words: "Fin's funeral suit was a year old, worn three times, already too small." Lady, stuck in her "gilded cage" of material comfort, finds her own life too small. You can tell she's a free spirit by the car she drives, way too fast, a turquoise convertible Karmann Ghia, and by the writers she quotes, like Whitman: "And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels." She thinks the best place to raise a child, in 1964, is not in the "cool, cushioned ease" of the uptown apartment she has inherited from her mother ("I really thought she'd leave it all to the Whitney"), but rather in freaked-out Greenwich Village. And so it is that Fin; Lady; her mother's feisty African-American maid, Mabel ; and Fin's loyal collie, Gus, squeeze into a half-finished and half-furnished townhouse on Charles Street - "where the beatniks live," Mabel says disgustedly. Soon enough, three suitors, referred to as "the Three Musketeers," move in as well, "drinking up Lady's liquor" and munching on anything in sight. "Biffi drinks, Jack is tripping, Tyler's doing speed," Fin remarks. "It's biblical. . . . Like a cloud of locusts." Schine, author of the best-selling comic novel "The Three Weissmanns of Westport," is aware of how much of this terrain - the available heiress, the domineering father, the three suitors, the orphaned boy, the enchanted island, even the disgruntled maid - is familiar. But, like comic writers before her from Shakespeare to Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh, she skillfully plays with the conventions and the reader's expectations - for example that the charming Hungarian refugee and art dealer Biffi (whose father died, in classic Nabokovian fashion, via "picnic, lightning") will win out over the other two suitors, the ascot-wearing Tyler and the Yale-educated Jack. There are few surprises in Schine's rendition of Greenwich Village 50 years ago, with its Nehru jackets and desert boots, pillows on the floor and rugs on the walls, the reefer and the rock 'n' roll. At Fin's progressive school, New Flower, the kids "discussed the liner notes of Bob Dylan albums" for Language Arts and, for math, arranged colored blocks. BUT a darker note, "something menacing," enters as the decade draws to a close: "Not just the war, though that was there, always, an accompaniment, like a soft drumbeat," but also the "police on horseback, high above you, with shining black boots digging into frothing sides." Always, everywhere, there are the runaway kids on the street, "dirty and strung out and homeless," a nightmare version of Lady's own penchant for running away from trouble. "Trailing smoke and scent and confusion," Lady is apparently meant to embody both sides of the '60s, the "groovy debutante" and the melancholy seeker, but she's also out of sync with her times. She's too much of an individualist, for example, to tolerate a commune: "Why would she live with other people, hell was other people, everyone knew that." In the end, "Lady did not take to the '60s at all." Lady's attitude toward families is resolutely unconventional. She has an abortion early on, raises her own half brother ("We're a family now," she tells Fin) and becomes an unwed mother at a time when such a thing "wasn't done." When a fourth suitor, an Italian photographer called Michelangelo, joins her entourage, he updates Tolstoy on happy families with his eloquently fractured English: "Families have many complicateds." If such "complicateds" prefigure the world of same-sex parents and international adoptions, they're also a hallmark of the comic genre Schine most values: the nontraditional attachments of Huck and Jim floating down the Mississippi, Kipling's Kim (also invoked in this novel) and his wandering lama in the Himalayas, Jim and Long John Silver on their enchanted island, and so on. The slyly deceptive narration Schine has adopted for telling her story is also unconventional. The reader is kept guessing, until almost the end, about the identity of the narrator, who has heard most of the tale we're reading from a much older Fin. This latter-day Fin has progressed beyond "his cramped, personal teenage misery and his big, apocalyptic, '60s teenage misery" to become, in his turn, a guardian of yet another lost child. For all its fixation on New York in the '60s, "Fin & Lady" turns out to have another emotional center - Capri, Homer's island of the Sirens. "The town was full of steps and alleys. Enormous lemons hung from vines. The beach was tiny, the harbor full of brightly painted boats. There were dolphins one day. The sun was high and hot. Children kicked a ball in the piazzetta. A bell rang. . . . Everything seemed enchanted. Every moment." And Lady "seemed somehow to belong on Capri . . . she was so at home. She knew everyone's name." Life, she seems to think, is simpler in Capri because "on Capri, no one needed chains. After all, it was an island. There was no place to run, and so no fetters to undo. Freedom, of sorts. Freedom for Lady, anyway. Freedom from all that freedom." If she turns out to be wrong, it's because the "complicateds" of life, as Cathleen Schine's wise and wistful comic novel not so comically reminds us, catch up with all of us in the end - the FIN. Lady embodies both sides of the '60s, the 'groovy debutante' and the melancholy seeker. Christopher Benfey teaches at Mount Holyoke College and is the author, most recently, of "Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay," a family memoir.
Library Journal Review
In this madcap novel, Schine (The Three Weissmanns of Westport) paints a fractured picture of the second half of the 1960s in New York's Greenwich Village. Fin, 11 years old and newly orphaned, leaves his rural Connecticut dairy farm home and comes to live with his half-sister, Lady. Only six years older than Fin, Lady is neurotic, capricious, and unstable. She enrolls Fin in a progressive school in which the children study Bob Dylan album notes, play with blocks, and deconstruct the academic hierarchy by first-naming everyone, even teachers. One only realizes by book's end that Fin is telling the story to his own ward. The author interview at book's end is of interest. Anne Twomey brings a thoughtful competence to the narration. -VERDICT This book is recommended to Schine fans and those who enjoy 1960s-set fiction and books told from the viewpoint of young characters. ["A good summer read for those who like their family dramas with more bite than sweetness," read the review of the Sarah Crichton: Farrar hc, LJ 7/13.]-David -Faucheux, Louisiana Audio Information & Reading Svc., Lafayette (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
"Let's go home" Fin's funeral suit was a year old, worn three times, already too small. He knew his mother was sick. He knew she went to the hospital to get treatments. He saw the dark blue lines and dots on her chest. "My tattoos," she said. She sang "Popeye the Sailor Man" and raised her skinny arms as if to flex her Popeye muscles, to make him laugh. He knew she was sick. He knew people died. But he never thought she would die. Not his mother. Not really. Lady came to the funeral, an unmistakably foreign presence in the bare, white Congregational church: she wore large sunglasses and wept audibly. Fin's neighbors, the Pounds, who raised big, thick Morgan horses, had been looking after Fin since his mother was taken to the hospital. "I'm sure your mother knew what she was doing," Mr. Pound said doubtfully when he saw Lady Hadley approach, her arms open wide, a lighted cigarette dangling from her lips. "I don't think she had much choice, dear," Mrs. Pound whispered to him. "There was no one else, was there?" "I like Lady," Fin said loyally. But she was terrifying, coming at him like some mad bird with a squawk of " Fratello mio! It's all so dreadful!" Lady put her arms around him and held him close. She was all he had, as Mrs. Pound had pointed out. All he had. He barely knew her. Unfamiliar arms. A stranger's cheek, wet with tears leaking from beneath her dark glasses. He wanted to cry, too, for so many reasons that they seemed to cancel one another out. He stood there like a statue, nauseated and faint. The other mourners stared at Lady. Why wouldn't they? She stood out. She vibrated, almost, in that quiet church. She was beautiful. Fin liked her hair, which was long. He liked her teeth. She thought they were too big, but she was wrong. She was like a horse. Not one of the Pounds' heavy Morgan horses with short sturdy necks and thick clomping legs. She was like a racehorse. Jittery. Majestic. Her long neck and long legs--and her face, too. She had a horsey face, in a beautiful way. And bangs, like a forelock. He'd told her that, the last time he'd seen her. He had been five. "You look like a horse," he'd said. "Charming," said Lady. "Me and Eleanor Roosevelt." He had not meant that at all. Eleanor Roosevelt, whose picture he'd seen in the newspaper, did not look like a horse. More like his grandmother. Big, sloping breast. Important face. He meant that Lady's eyes were huge and dark, that her cheekbones were high and pronounced, that her face was aristocratic and long, that her hair flew in the wind like a mane, that she was coltish even in her movements of tentative wildness and reckless dignity. He didn't know that he meant all that when he was five. He just knew that she reminded him of a horse. He was eleven now. He had not seen her for six years. She still reminded him of a horse. "A racehorse," he had added when he was five, and Lady had smiled and said, "Oh, that's all right, then." When the funeral was over, Lady would not allow him to go to the grave site. "It's barbaric," she said to Mr. and Mrs. Pound. They looked at her with shocked faces, pinched by hurt at what they, rightly, took to be Lady's dismissal of every aspect of almost two thousand years of religious tradition. "The kid is hanging on by his eyelids," she said. "I saw Daddy buried," Fin said. "And Grandma and Grandpa." "I rest my case," said Lady. "You're the boss," Mr. Pound said. He heaved a sigh, then he shook Fin's hand and wished him luck in his new life. Mrs. Pound hugged him and said he'd make his mother proud in heaven, and then he did start to cry and ran outside. Humiliating, to cry at his age. Babies cried. The Pounds had a baby, a bald sticky one that screamed for no reason, out of the blue. Mrs. Pound would pick it up and hug it. Fin wanted to shake it, although, really, he could not imagine even touching it. It was an obnoxious baby. "I'll give you something to cry about," Fin's father used to say. Then he died. The Pounds' baby had its parents. Stuart was its name. Fin had taken one of its toys and given it to the dog. The baby didn't even notice. * * * Lady found him outside, pressed against the side of the church, still crying like Stuart, who didn't even know enough to realize his toy had been stolen. "Go away," he said. "Fat chance." "Leave me alone." "Come on, pal." She took his hand, gently. "Just please go away." He tried to pull his hand back. Lady did not let go. Instead, she gave a violent pull. "Hey!" he said. "Quit it." She had almost yanked him off his feet. "See?" she said. "Nothing like a good shock. No more tears! Poof! Just like hiccups." They walked toward the parking lot. He kept what he hoped was a safe distance. His father had called Lady a loose cannon. Among other things. "Come on, Finino," she said, reaching out, taking his hand. Her voice was so gentle. Finino. That's what she'd called him the first time he saw her. "Come on, Finino," she said again. "Let's go home." * * * Lady's car was a turquoise convertible, a Karmann Ghia, and driving in the tiny sports car with the sky above him diverted Fin for the ten-minute trip back to the house. When they got there, Fin and Lady stood for a moment on the porch. "Now, Fin," she said, a hand on each shoulder, surveying him, "this has been a tragedy of monstrous proportions." Monstrous proportions. Fin remembered how much he loved the way Lady spoke. Sometimes she sounded like the ladies in slinky dresses in old movies on TV. Sometimes she sounded like a cowboy. Monstrous proportions. It was a tragedy, it was monstrous, a monster so big he would never get past it. "So. Of course you'll want a nice bath and then a nap." "No thank you." He looked down at the worn boards of the porch. They needed paint. He had helped his grandfather paint them just two years ago, holding the brushes mostly, cleaning them with turpentine and a rag. "No? Really? That's what I do, you know, when tragedy strikes. A nice stiff drink, a soak in the tub, a nap..." A stiff drink. That's a good one, Fin thought. "I'm eleven," he said. "Ah," she said. "Too old for a nap, too young for a drink. Is that what you're saying?" He felt shy in front of Lady. She was so vivid. Everything about her. Her dress was inches shorter than any dress he'd ever seen, and though it was a good sober navy blue like his suit, it had incongruous bright white piping along the edges that seemed to be made of plastic. When she smiled, her head tilted back and her teeth emerged, white and straight except for one. He heard the cows in the distance. They were in the upper pasture. Who would bring them down? Who would milk them? "What about the cows?" he asked. "I can't just leave them." It was a sweltering day, and he stood in his heavy wool suit on his own porch in the heat, in the dull cushion of sadness he realized he must now carry with him every minute of every day. He wiped his eyes and his nose on his navy wool sleeve, leaving it stained and wet. He imagined the cows, abandoned, bony, and weak. "The cows," he said, looking at Lady. "What about the cows?" "Is that them? Mooing?" Lady took him by the hand. "Come on, Fin, let's go see what they want. Cows!" she called out. "Oh, cows!" Fin gave her a sideways glance to see if she was making fun of him, but she looked quite earnest. He led her past the manure pile, through the gate, over the hill in the lower pasture and into the green hills of the upper. The cows were gathered, flicking their tails, beneath a tree, two of them lying down, two standing facing the approaching humans. Fin patted the two standing cows, Daisy and Darlington. They had been his mother's favorites. Guernseys. He looked back at Lady, who had kept her distance from the animals. Lady's shoes--flat, not like his mother's high heels, and white--were covered with mud and manure and grass stains. "You ruined your shoes, I guess," Fin said, a little guiltily. "Are they okay? The cows?" "I guess they are." "You do a lot of guessing, don't you, Fin?" He grinned. "I guess." They went back toward the house. Fin herded the cows through the gate with clucks and slaps on their rumps, determined not to cry again as he thought of leaving them. The cows would remain on the farm in their own barn awaiting his return when he was old enough to take care of them himself. Jim Cornelius was moving in and would look after the farm, Lady said. Fin liked plump, smiling Mr. Cornelius. He was the music teacher at school. But Mr. Cornelius did not belong on his grandparents' farm, in his grandparents' house. He belonged behind the upright piano in school, pounding out the notes and overenunciating the words of cheerful songs that made no sense: Have you ever Seen Quebec? Don -key riding ... When they got back to the house, Fin's suit was filthy, covered by a film of dust. He stood inside the door, leaning against the screen, weary and low. He wished Lady would offer him a glass of lemonade. His mother often made lemonade for him in the summer. But his mother was gone. She had died of cancer, a word that was whispered fearfully, as if even its enunciation might be deadly. The thought of her holding a glass out to him in those last weeks before she was moved to the hospital, her emaciated arm trembling, her face drawn and purposefully cheerful, made him miss her in a way he had not yet had time to do. How could he, with all the sympathetic fussing of neighbors interrupting him every time he sat down to think? They meant well. But sometimes you need to be alone. He felt alone, even surrounded by neighbors and pie. But sometimes you need to really be alone. He glanced at Lady and got the feeling that would be no problem in the future. More than anything he had ever wanted before, he wanted at that moment to bury his face in his mother's shoulder one more time. But there was only Lady. She tilted her head and gazed back at him curiously until he finally found the courage to ask her if he could get a glass of water. "Water is for washing," she said gaily. But she followed him into his grandmother's kitchen, watched him get a glass out of the cupboard and hold it under the tap, then lighted a cigarette and watched him drink. "What about Gus?" he asked when he'd finished. "Gus?" "Our dog." He paused. Then: "My dog." "Oh God. A mutt, too?" "He's not a mutt. He's a collie." "Shouldn't it stay here with its flock of cows? Won't it be sad without them?" "He would be sad without me." What Fin didn't say was that he would be sad without Gus, but Lady didn't need him to, it appeared. "Oh God," she said again. "Well, where is Rin Tin Tin hiding, anyway?" He was at the Pounds'. "He's at the pound? Good grief, they couldn't wait until after the funeral?" "No," Fin said. "The Pounds, the people you met, the people who took care of me." "Thank God," she said. "I do not approve of euthanasia, Fin. Remember that. If it ever comes up." "What's euthanasia?" "Come on," she said. Fin had packed his clothes in a large suitcase. A pair of blue jeans, two pairs of cotton slacks for school, his shirts. His sneakers. Two sweaters. His winter jacket. He hadn't been sure what to pack, really. He had never packed for himself. His toothbrush. He had almost forgotten it. In a box he'd put his baseball glove, toy soldiers, comics, models, books, and records. He wondered if Lady had a record player. "The rest will be put in storage, Finny. So don't worry." "This is all I have," he said. "There is no other stuff. No stuff that's mine." "I'm afraid it's all yours now." Lady pointed to his grandmother's collection of little Delft houses, to the needlepoint pillows, to the cranberry glass and the wooden rocking chair--to everything in the house. And then she pointed out the windows. "The cows, too, Finny." It hit Fin then for the first time that he was really leaving. It hit him then, and not for the last time, that nothing would ever be the same again. Copyright © 2013 by Cathleen Schine Excerpted from Fin and Lady by Cathleen Schine All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
