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Summary
Summary
In a single week, a family leaves behind its past and a daughter awakens to the future in Emily Chenoweth's intimate and beautifully crafted debut novel.
In the winter of 1990, Helen Hansen--counselor, wife, and mother in the prime of her life--is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. The following August, Helen, her husband, Elliott, and their daughter, Abby, a freshman in college, take a trip to northern New Hampshire, where Helen will be able to say goodbye to a lifetime of friends. Ensconced in a historic resort in the White Mountains--a place where afternoon cocktails are served on the veranda and men are expected to wear jackets after six--the Hansens and their guests must improvise their own rituals of remembrance and reconnection.
For Elliott, the trip is a parting gift to his beloved wife, as well as some needed respite from the caretaking duties that have become his main work. For Helen and the procession of old friends who come to pay their respects, the days offer a poignant celebration of a dear, too-brief life. And for Abby, still unaware that her mother's cancer is terminal, the week brings a surprising conflict between loyalty and desire as, drawn by the youthful, spirited hotel staff, she finds herself caught between the affections of two very different young men.
Heartbreaking and luminous, Hello Goodbye deftly explores a family's struggle with love and loss, as a summer vacation becomes an occasion for awakening rather than farewell, and life inevitably blossoms in the face of death.
Author Notes
Emily Chenoweth is a former fiction editor of Publishers Weekly . Her work has appeared in Tin House, Bookforum, and People, among other publications. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A family copes with a mother's terminal cancer in Chenoweth's moving and assured debut. The Hansens-Elliot, Helen and college-age daughter Abby-spend a week at a swanky New Hampshire hotel shortly after Helen's oncologist gives her nine months to live. Old family friends come out for the decadent soiree, and as the parents reminisce with friends, Abby wanders the woodsy grounds in a self-absorbed funk, hiding from the humiliation brought about by her mother's diminished capacity. Then one of the hotel's waiters, Alex, begins courting her with poetry and secret notes, and Abby is both attracted and repelled by Alex and the gang of summer employees, who have a predilection for skinny dipping and pot brownies. As Abby slides bumpily from shrugging off reality to facing her mother's fate, the assembled friends and family prepare for a round of wrenching farewells. Chenoweth's smart, unsentimental and poignant takes on living and dying ring true, and her exploration of coming-of-age and coming to terms with mortality is divine. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
Rennie Airth ignores all the popular wisdom about how to maintain a detective series. His meticulously detailed procedural mysteries are beautifully written but few in number and published five to six years apart. And his all-too-mortal characters not only age but lose their edge. Yet this South African-born writer has produced three novels that are well worth reading, and rereading, whenever we're engaged in war. The story Airth has to tell doesn't deal with combat itself - the only battle scenes are the ones relived in the minds of his haunted characters - but with the disorienting social and psychic illnesses that emerge in its aftermath. Beginning in 1999 with "River of Darkness," he examined the impact on a tranquil village in Surrey when a deranged World War I veteran breached the peace by invading homes and slaughtering entire families. Since serial killers were almost unheard of in 1921, Inspector John Madden and his colleagues at Scotland Yard were forced to educate themselves in new and baffling fields of forensic science. Jumping to 1932, "The Blood-Dimmed Tide" found England caught in a crippling postwar Depression that cost people their homes, their livelihood and their dignity. So, along with absorbing the shocking phenomenon of serial sex killers, the detectives also sought to find a humane way of dealing with the armies of dispirited homeless men, many of them war veterans, wandering the countryside. Without entirely leaving the series's Surrey setting behind, THE DEAD OF WINTER (Viking, $25.95) shifts the scene to London, which in 1944 is still under German attack. Although long retired from the police force and now living a rural life, Madden comes up from the country to investigate the murder of the Polish "land girl" who worked on his farm and had been visiting her aunt in the city. The world he finds in these last days of the war is harder and colder than the one he once knew. It's not just the prostitutes and thieves working the bombed-out streets; international criminals have also made sophisticated advances in smuggling. And, unlike the murderers in the previous books, the man killing refugees who have found sanctuary as agricultural workers is a new kind of villain - a professional assassin - so the police hardly know what to make of such an anomaly. Reading these three novels in sequence, it's impossible to miss Airth's cautionary message: wars never end; they just bring the violence back home to poison the ground we all walk on. A man who calls himself David Loogan settles down in Ann Arbor, Mich., takes an editing job at a literary mystery magazine called Gray Streets, forms a friendship with the publisher, has an affair with the publisher's wife and helps his employer dig a grave for a man he has just killed. All this happens in the opening chapters of Harry Dolan's first novel, BAD THINGS HAPPEN (Amy Einhorn/Putnam, $24.95), so you better believe he has a gift for storytelling. Although the plot is fairly outlandish, the narrative comes with startling developments and nicely tricky reversals. There's also something appealingly offbeat about the wry, dry tone of its academic humor, which has much to do with the self-important authors who figure in the hectic plot, either as murder suspects or as the victims of a killer who seems to be culling the Gray Streets contributors list. Aside from the interestingly enigmatic hero, the publisher of the crime mag is the only character with a fully developed mind and conscience, and when he's murdered we cheer Loogan's loyal efforts to find his killer. But the lying literati are more fun to watch as they fluff their professional feathers in an attempt to justify their illicit, illegal or just plain nasty behavior. Two late-19th-century cowboy brothers who become so caught up in "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" that they turn themselves into Wild West "deducifiers" in the manner of Holmes and Watson - how cute is that? Not only cute but clever, as Steve Hockensmith demonstrates in THE CRACK IN THE LENS (Minotaur, $24.99) and the three previous books in his idiosyncratic series featuring Old Red Amlingmeyer (the gloomy, thoughtful brother) and his irrepressible younger sibling, Big Red (the one who knows how to read and write). The "deducifying" is pretty primitive, but so is the society the boys find themselves in when they set out for the Texas hill country and the whorehouse where Old Red's one true love was murdered a few years earlier. Before Old Red puzzles out the mystery of her death, Hockensmith makes sure that readers get a lightly comic taste of Old West manners and morals, so be prepared for some lively lynchings and saloon brawls - and a whole lot of spitting. Sloane Pearson, the Chicago cop who was introduced in Theresa Schwegel's "Probable Cause" and who returns in LAST KNOWN ADDRESS (Minotaur, $24.99), is a fighter, which is genre code for a woman constantly goaded by men into unladylike eruptions of temper. (The guys at the station house are always flicking her ponytail.) Pearson's pugnacious temperament happens to suit the situation here, which has the scrappy officer standing up for the traumatized victims of a serial rapist. Schwegel doesn't advance her staid but serviceable style by pointlessly shifting the narrative voice, but she's consistently firm on her theme: the vulnerability of young women forced to become "social pioneers" by making their homes in the only neighborhoods they can afford - the dangerous ones. In Rennie Airth's latest crime novel, it's 1944 and a professional assassin is killing refugees in London.
Kirkus Review
An understated debut novel of great beauty and power about a vibrant woman who contracts terminal brain cancer. It begins with a typical day in the life of Helen: She comes in from her morning run, makes coffee, works on her grocery listand then experiences an exploding light and "a great wonder of anguish." From this moment, her life changes irrevocably. After a grueling course of chemotherapy and radiation, her husband Elliott, headmaster at a school in New Hampshire, arranges a visit to a resort hotel where they will celebrate their 20th anniversary with old friends. Also on this retreatone can scarcely call it a vacationis Abby, the couple's 18-year-old daughter, who hasn't been told that her mother's illness is terminal. Chenoweth adopts an interesting narrative technique. While Helen is always the central figure, we spend much time away from her and in the consciousness of her family and friends. We meet Dom, still in love with Helen after 15 or more years of friendship, and Neil, whose "new" wife Sylvie is too bohemian to fit in with this staid older crowd. We see Elliott's anguish and his attenuated ability to comfort his wife and Abby's tentativeness as she emerges from the shelter provided by her parents and partially glimpses the seriousness of her mother's conditionall while we witness Helen's dignity in the face of debilitation, her efforts to remain cheerful both for her sake and for her family and friends. The novel ends with Helen's moving epiphany: "The world is beautiful, and she is so glad she has seen it." Heartbreaking yet unsentimental. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Elliott Hansen and his wife, Helen, are celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary with a party at a luxury hotel in New Hampshire, where they lived ten years earlier before moving to Ohio. Elliott has planned well, inviting their New England friends and neighbors and keeping the truth from Helen that her inoperable brain cancer is fatal. Their 18-year-old daughter, Abby, is also in the dark, which is why she is feeling resentful and solitary among these old friends and anxious to discover her worth, even if it's with a preppie hotel waiter. The guests dance around the inevitable, perhaps because facing reality has been something they have avoided for as long as they have known one another. This richly textured, multilayered treatise on learning to give up hope while still grasping at straws is searing in its approach to losing those we hold dear. First novelist Chenoweth, a former editor at Publishers Weekly, writes gracefully and eloquently of loss and love, portraying both generations at their most self-absorbed and most vulnerable. Highly recommended. [Online discussion guide; library marketing.]-Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
February 1990 By the time Helen comes in from her run, the first sparks of dawn, pale orange and chilly, are reaching through the bare trees in the backyard. On the other side of the fence, across a gully cut by a thin creek, the neighboring hospital puffs steam into the morning. From its vents and chimneys and pipes, clouds rise, catching light in their curling forms, turning pink and then fading to white. She slides a filter into the coffeemaker, pours in the last of the dark grounds, and leans against the counter. She's been dizzy since her last mile, and sometimes when she turns her head quickly, her vision takes a moment to catch up: the breakfast table seems to wobble in the corner, and a silver blob resolves itself belatedly into the refrigerator. Call eye doctor, she scribbles on the grocery list, then adds Folgers below milk and carrots. When her daughter came home for winter break, Helen brewed endless pots of coffee; four months of college had turned Abby into a proper addict. She'd become a vegetarian, too, and a quasi- environmentalist, and an earnest proponent of domestic equity. She'd lectured Helen about the necessity of composting and talked at length about "the second shift," which had something to do with how Helen, like most American women, had to work outside the home as well as make the dinners and do the laundry. When Helen went to college, there was Mass every day in the chapel and a dress code; one studied European history, geography, and psychology. Two decades later, her daughter is going to classes with names like "Literature of Conscience" and "Gender, Power, and Identity," in jeans with sagging knees and sloppy, fraying cuffs. She reads books about poverty and oppression, which she discusses in classrooms with the children of the privileged. Abby considers Helen oppressed, though she will admit that, on the scale of cosmic injustices, her mother doesn't have all that much to complain about. Helen yearns for her daughter when she's gone, and she knows that Abby misses her, too. If Helen could, she'd go back to college with Abby-not to learn about poststructuralism or semiology, whatever those are, but just to watch her daughter's life unfolding. She'd live in a different dorm, of course, or even off campus. But she'd be nearby, for support, and maybe sometimes they could meet for tofu burgers at the student- run café. She knows this is ludicrous, but there is no schooling the heart. She presses the start button on the coffeemaker, and it begins to make its comforting, burbling noises. The cat stitches itself around her ankles as she stands watching the first drops of coffee fall. Helen nudges her with her toe, but the cat comes back, purring, insistent. "Oh, Pig," Helen says. "Get a life." She rubs her temples -Honestly, she thinks, maybe I should go lie down again- and then her thoughts turn to Regina McNamara, one of her favorite and most incorrigible kids, busted yesterday for underage drinking in the city park right next to the police station. Helen has been a counselor at the county juvenile court for almost a decade. She knows all the bad kids and all the formerly bad kids, and every time she pumps her gas or goes to the grocery store she runs into one of the reformed; helping them find jobs is one of her specialties. The coffeemaker hisses and bubbles. She stares at it, willing it to work faster, and in the corner of her eye there is a strange flash, like that of a lightbulb that has popped and burn Excerpted from Hello Goodbye: A Novel by Emily Chenoweth 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.
