5-9-2009
Labor Day, by Joyce Maynard
Site: www.joycemaynard.com
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
FICTION
Sometimes It's Okay to Pick Up a Scary Drifter
By Caroline Preston
LABOR DAY
By Joyce Maynard
William Morrow.
244 pp. $24.99
With Labor Day fast approaching, many of us are already looking forward to the last-blast-of-summer rituals, family barbecues and backyard baseball games. But for Henry, the likable 13-year-old narrator of Joyce Maynard's moving new novel, Labor Day weekend is shaping up like the rest of his lonely summer with nothing to do except watch television, play with his hamster and fantasize about his female classmates.
Henry lives in a small New Hampshire town with his beautiful, fragile mother, Adele, who has shrunk back from the world after a wounding divorce. Because Adele is too agoraphobic to venture out much, they subsist on canned soup and Cap'n Andy frozen fish dinners. But the Thursday before Labor Day weekend, Henry persuades his mother to go on a back-to-school shopping trip to the local Pricemart. There an unkempt man with a gash on his forehead approaches them and asks for a ride. "I'd be careful not to get blood on your seat," he says.
While this request would send most of us sprinting to store security, Henry and Adele are so unworldly and desperate for company that they agree. When the man, Frank Chambers, confesses that he's a convicted murderer who's gotten his wounds in a prison escape, a sense of dread begins to mount.
But Frank's claim that Adele and Henry have "never been in better hands" seems, incredibly, to be true. Over the next five days, Frank teaches Henry a few important life skills -- how to throw a baseball, how to change a flat tire, how to make a flaky pie crust. Frank and Adele, both love-starved, become infatuated, and she begins to snap out of her long depression. Henry feels jealous but is mostly relieved that Frank can take over the burden of his mother. "I am not responsible for making her happy anymore. That job can be his now. This leaves me free for other things. My own life, for instance."
It is a testament to Maynard's skill that she makes this ominous setup into a convincing and poignant coming-of-age tale. As she has revealed in her memoirs and five previous novels, Maynard has had her own share of unsuitable attachments (including an intense pen pal relationship with a convicted murderer). She understands the deep yearnings that drive people to impulsive decisions and sometimes reckless behavior.
As Henry looks back on that fateful Labor Day weekend, he decides that Frank's most useful lesson was quite simple: Take a leap of faith and believe "that you would land on your own two feet."
Preston's most recent novel is "Gatsby's Girl."
Fiction Chronicle
Reviews by TOM LeCLAIR
Published: August 21, 2009
LABOR DAY
By
Joyce Maynard
Morrow/HarperCollins
In tennis tournaments, “lucky losers” are players included in the main draw despite failing in the final qualifying round. In “Labor Day,” the losers are a poor and depressed single mother, her hapless 13-year-old son and the escaped murderer they welcome into their New Hampshire home for the 1987 end-of-summer holiday. Luckily for Adele and Henry, Frank is a really nice guy who can immediately meet Adele’s romantic and sexual needs, make a great peach pie and teach Henry how to throw a baseball. Not that there aren’t some minor issues, like harboring a wanted man and Henry’s fear that Adele and Frank will run off to Canada without him. The book is narrated two decades later by Henry, unsuccessfully pretending he’s 13 again, which makes him a two-time loser. If “Labor Day” is supposed to be a feel-good story, why did I feel so bad while reading it? Because it’s less likely and more saccharine than the escaped con’s lovingly described peach pie.
Tom LeClair’s fifth novel, “Passing Through,” was published last year.
San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, August 9, 2009
'Labor Day,' by Joyce Maynard
Elizabeth Fishel
Joyce Maynard knows her way around domestic life, its coziness and craziness. She knows baby love and baby lust, child-raising and pie-making, squirrelly teenage boys and snooty young girls, passion and boredom.
She practically has an advanced degree in relationships on the rocks. Since she burst on the scene at 18 in 1972, she has written terrific nonfiction about all these subjects, including the memorable "Domestic Affairs," a collection of columns about raising her three children in New Hampshire and the breakup of her marriage. In "Labor Day," her latest novel, she explores many of these favorite topics in fiction with mixed success.
The premise is promising and full of foreboding. On a sizzling hot Labor Day weekend in a small New Hampshire town ("a place where people knew each other's business"), Frank, a prisoner, escapes from the local penitentiary. After a random encounter at a Pricemart, he insinuates himself into the lives of two people almost as down on their luck as he is. There's the novel's narrator, 13-year-old Henry, and his troubled single mother, Adele, who's raising him after the divorce with weekly visits from his dad. Adele rarely goes out. While an all-points bulletin is launched for Frank's arrest, the three hole up in the house. It's a hostage situation that could be a disaster but becomes instead a weird weekend of family bonding.
Maynard is masterful at the offhand details that reveal three people at their wits' ends. Frank, on the lam, offers to buy Henry a puzzle book but needs to give him an IOU "since at the moment his funds were limited." Adele pours a gallon of milk on the floor after being grilled by a social worker about child custody. "It was like she was missing the outer layer of skin that allows people to get through the day without bleeding all the time," observes Henry's father about his ex-wife. "The world got to be too much for her."
But the novel's most convincing voice is Henry, poised between little boy and mouthy teen. Wise and wide-eyed and forthright, he's Holden Caulfield without the edge, and the pleasure of this novel comes from listening to his narrative take on what he sees. Maynard is confident and at ease painting Henry's world, his Einstein poster and mineral collection, his Narnia books and signed letter from the Apollo 12 astronauts, his copy of Thousand and One Great Party Jokes.
Watching his mother and Frank gradually falling in love, Henry admits, "here is one of the best parts about his showing up. I am not responsible for making her happy anymore. That job can be his now. This leaves me free for other things. My own life, for instance."
While Frank and Adele cocoon in the house all weekend, turning it into their love nest, Henry begins to venture into the outside world. He meets an edgy, slightly older girl and stumbles into first-time love. "She was wearing a dress so short it made you think maybe she hadn't finished getting dressed," offers Henry. Their romance feels authentic, meant-to-be.
But the relationship that unfolds between Frank and Adele requires much more suspension of disbelief. In their previous lives before fate brought them together, these two aggrieved souls have both suffered wounding losses. Frank's setback explains, in part, the motive behind his crime, Adele's the reason she's afraid to venture out. The layering of their histories moves the plot along but also gets a little, well, labored. You want to believe that one weekend of domestic bliss can turn their lives around, but even a narrator as charming as Henry struggles to make a convincing case.
Elizabeth Fishel is the author of "Reunion: The Girls We Used to Be, the Women We Became" and the co-editor of "Something That Matters."
Los Angeles Times
August 7, 2009
'Labor Day' by Joyce Maynard
The thirtysomething protagonist, reminiscing about his teen years and an odd family setting, bears more than a passing resemblance to Maynard herself.
By Donna Rifkind
Holidays in American fiction are often the tearful crossroads where domestic
expectations clash with domestic reality. Joyce Maynard's sixth novel, "Labor
Day," fits right in with this subgenre of broken dreams, chronicling a tense
end-of-summer weekend in 1987 in a New Hampshire town.
The book's narrator is Henry, a man in his early 30s who is looking back on his
fateful 13th year, when he lived with his mother after his parents' divorce.
Labor Day weekend for adolescent Henry is a muggy, breathless pause between the
tedium of vacation and the misery of middle school. But life gets a little more
exciting when his mother, a depressive loner who rarely leaves the house, takes
him to Pricemart to buy him some new pants.
In the store's magazine section, a stranger asks Henry for help. He's tall and
muscular and appears perfectly competent, but when Henry notices that his leg is
bleeding, the man explains that he fell out of a window. "[M]aybe it was that
everything seemed so odd back then," reflects the older Henry; "this comment in
particular didn't stand out."
Things turn odder still when the stranger -- whose name is Frank -- cajoles
Henry's mother into giving him a ride to her house. "He was probably the first
person we'd had over in a year. Possibly two," Henry confides. Yet his mother
seems utterly unfazed by Frank, even after he tells them that he just escaped
from the state penitentiary, where he'd been doing time for murder.
Faster than you can say "suspension of disbelief," this trio of misfits adjusts
into a facsimile of a happy family. Frank makes himself at home in Henry's dark,
cluttered house. While TV news reports burble warnings about the search for the
dangerous felon, Frank does the laundry, cleans the furnace filters, offers
Henry baseball tips and teaches him how to make peach pie. Meanwhile, Henry's
mother and Frank fall into a dreamy, hostage-flavored romance. With her full
cooperation, Frank ties her up with her own scarves and feeds her his homemade
chili, as Henry looks uncomfortably on. "I shouldn't be here was how I felt," he
murmurs. We're with him.
Reduced to its broad outlines, "Labor Day" can't help sounding a little
ridiculous: a goofy mash-up of "Mary Poppins," "The Bridges of Madison County"
and "Cape Fear," minus the fear. But there is a lot more to it than that. Like
all the fiction Joyce Maynard has written, her new novel may lack many of the
literary qualities thought necessary to create a convincing illusion, yet it
will not be dismissed. It insists on having its say.
We can't fully understand that insistence without knowing something about
Maynard's own personal story, which she detailed in her eyebrow-raising 1998
memoir, "At Home in the World." In that book, she depicts the homes of her youth
and young adulthood as far less cozy than the idealized representations she saw
on her favorite TV shows. Her early years were dominated by her father's
alcoholic rages and her mother's seething frustration. From a very young age she
worked feverishly to fulfill both parents' grand expectations, eventually
selling a cover story to the New York Times Magazine, in 1972, called "An
Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life." She too insisted on having her say.
The article, with its full-length photo, caught the attention of none other than
author J. D. Salinger, then 53 years old and living semi-reclusively in
small-town New Hampshire, about 60 miles from Maynard's own childhood home.
Before too long she dropped out of Yale and moved in with Salinger, with her
parents' inexplicable benediction.
Less than a year later, before she had turned 20, Salinger unceremoniously threw
her out. Maynard used her earnings as a budding writer to buy her own cabin in
the woods, where she nearly had a nervous breakdown. There followed a succession
of apartments and houses; a marriage; three children; a divorce. Through it all
Maynard has remained almost obsessively domestic -- her website includes a video
in which she demonstrates how to make a proper pie crust, just as Frank does in
her new novel -- yet she still seems haunted by an unfulfilled dream of home.
Backed up by this autobiographical information, "Labor Day" begins to make much
more sense. It too is haunted by impossible fantasies of a happy home. And it
too features a scarred adult who looks back on the ruin of his childhood in an
attempt to make some sense of it. Its best moments come straight from real life:
Henry talks of making a coupon for his mother that offer his services as
"Husband for a day" -- something Maynard mentions in a website article that her
own son once did for her. Learning how to make pie with Frank gives Henry "a
nice feeling. . . . Like we were all normal people here." Considering all the
ways it's possible to be uncomfortably cooped up with family over a long holiday
weekend, the notion of harboring a dangerous fugitive as a father figure doesn't
seem quite so outlandish after all.
Rifkind is a critic whose work has appeared in several publications, including
the Washington Post and the New York Times.
The Dallas Morning News
Labor Day
Joyce Maynard
(William Morrow, $24.99)
Joyce Maynard is one of those blessed authors who can compress a lifetime's worth of ideas and emotions into a spare piece of work. The closest comparison I can make is Ian McEwan, whose Atonement has some of the same elements as Maynard's latest novel: the pangs of adolescence, the roller-coaster swells and dips of love and loss, a devastating betrayal from an intimate source.
With Labor Day, Maynard concocts that heady brew in a mere 244 pages, depicting the events of a late 1980s Labor Day weekend through the eyes of 13-year-old narrator Henry.
Henry lives with his mother, Adele, in the small town of Holton, N.H., "the kind of town where people know each other's business," Henry laments. "They'd notice if you left your grass too long between one lawn mowing and the next, and if you painted your house some color besides white, they might not say anything to your face, but they'd talk about it. Where my mother was the kind of person who just wanted to be left alone. ... At this point, my mother's goal was to be invisible, or as close as she could get."
Adele is still reeling from the divorce from Henry's father, who has remarried and has a stepson and a new daughter. Henry, his loyalties set in stone, steadfastly refuses to call the new child "sister:" "Our family was my mother, Adele, and me, period. I would have counted the hamster, Joe, before including that baby, Chloe." As it turns out, Joe precipitates the book's climactic crisis.
In the book's opening pages, Henry convinces Adele that he needs new school clothes, and they go on a rare outing to Pricemart. There, Henry meets a man who asks for a ride, and they end up taking him home. This is the only note in the book that rings false; Adele seems awfully reserved and protective to put herself and her son in danger by inviting Frank, a complete stranger, into their lives.
The encounter turns into something that under the pen of, say, Harlan Coben, would turn into a terrifying thriller. Here, though, Maynard improbably, gorgeously maintains the gentle atmosphere she's already created. Frank and Adele, both love-starved, turn toward each other as Henry, bewildered but not disapproving, looks on.
It's only when Henry brings another person into the equation, a teenage girl he's trying to impress, that things turn ugly. Henry doesn't betray Adele and Frank, exactly, but he says too much, and he's hardly innocent of the possible consequences.
In depicting Henry's awkward but determined straining away from his mother, while still wanting all of her attention for himself and struggling to reconcile those warring emotions, Maynard has forged an indelible, precise portrait of early adolescence. It's a perfect late-summer book, a page-turner that also makes you think.
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newsday.com |
LABOR DAY, by Joyce Maynard. William Morrow, 244 pp., $24.99.
Here's the premise: A battered, bleeding murderer on the lam from prison meets a 13-year-old boy and his reclusive single mom in the New Hampshire discount store to which they've made a rare foray. They take him home, fall in love, and hole up for a five-day honeymoon of pie making, baseball throwing and headboard banging (or, in young Henry's case, listening to headboard banging) - until, inevitably, the sirens wail.
As in her best-known novel, "To Die For" - in which a newscaster pays her boy toy to kill her husband - Joyce Maynard begins with a flashy tabloid premise. But instead of the cool, cutting satire of the earlier work, "Labor Day," narrated by Henry, is suffused with tenderness, dreaminess and love. It is tender even toward its villain - not the convict, but an anorexic teenage girl Henry meets in the library. But is tenderest toward Adele, the mom, a one-time dancer who looks like Ginger on "Gilligan's Island," a damaged woman hiding at the end of a dead-end street in a very small town. She has laid in a year's supply of macaroni and soup; they have mail-order catalogs (the book is set in the mid '80s, before online shopping), they have a hamster, mother-son home dance lessons and Spanish flash cards.
As Adele puts it, "How many errands does a person really need to do? . . . When you think about it, all that going around to places just wasted so much time you could be spending in your own home."
"Labor Day" is first and foremost a page-turner, and its momentum and brevity compensate for a couple of distractions along the way. For example, though I was moved by the depth of its compassion for Adele's losses - a stillborn baby and a divorce - I wondered if an adolescent boy could feel and know as much about them as Henry does. Supposedly he is telling the story from a distance of many years, but this older-and-wiser perspective surfaces rarely and feels like an abandoned premise or an afterthought. Fortunately, the traces of wishful ventriloquism in some of his insights are balanced with moments of pure 13-ness - insecurity, naiveté, horniness, a little snideness.
The other stumbling block to suspension of disbelief is the character of Frank Chambers. The convicted killer of his wife and infant son, Frank is a wholly blameless and profoundly gentle saint (not to mention parenting guru and pastry chef). For nonpareil soft-core fantasy, try the scene where this man with a price on his head carefully ties Adele to a chair with silk scarves and feeds her dinner.
For me, these caveats were swept away by the steamroller plot, which shatters everyone's happiness with misunderstandings and betrayals born of colliding sexualities. Though it is being compared to Ian McEwan's "Atonement" for this reason, "Labor Day" puts back together the world it destroys. "Eighteen years passed," opens the next-to-last chapter, beginning the part where you definitely need to get a box of tissues.
The Washington Times
LABOR DAY
By Joyce Maynard
William Morrow, An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, $24.99, 241 pages
THE SIGNAL
By Ron Carlson
Viking, $25.95, 184 pages
BETWEEN THE ASSASSINATIONS
By Aravind Adiga
Free Press, $24, 336 pages
In 1972, as a freshman at Yale, Joyce Maynard was chosen to write a cover story for the New York Times magazine. "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life" and the cover photo of the very gamine author got her lots of attention, including a fan letter from the famously reclusive writer J.D. Salinger. After corresponding with him for a few months and visiting briefly, Ms. Maynard dropped out of college to move in with Mr. Salinger, her senior by 40 years. By the time she wrote about the year-long affair that followed in her 1998 memoir, "At Home in the World," Ms. Maynard was the successful author of several novels and much of the rest of her life was well known to readers via columns and blogs that documented her doings in great detail.
She wrote about marriage and divorce, raising three children and the decision to deal with her "post breast-feeding" body's lack of "perkiness" by having breast implants (and then trading in the big implants for smaller ones.) Her books, blogs and writing workshops have a devoted following. So her new novel, "Labor Day," out in time to be the last book read on the beach or at the cabin, will surely find a receptive audience. It is a story so improbable and with an ending so primordially satisfying that it might be described as a fairy tale. It is even told in the voice of one just out of childhood, 13-year-old Henry, a boy caught between the predictable respectability of weekend dinners with his father, stepmother and baby half-sister, and what he considers his "real" family — his mother, Adele. She is anything but predictable, a former dancer so agoraphobic that the only job she can have is selling vitamins over the telephone.
On a rare excursion to town, milling around a mega-store after picking out clothes for the upcoming school year, Henry meets a man who is wearing the uniform shirt of a Pricemart employee but seems a bit odd. One of his legs is oozing blood and there's a thin trickle on his face, too. He asks Henry to introduce him to his mom.
The story that follows is as lurid and engrossing as a fairy tale and its themes are just as adult. The pleasures of domesticity are front and center, but so is sex — the 13- year-old's crude preoccupation with his own body, his uncomfortable observation of what is happening between his mother and Frank and his ultimate recognition of its relationship to love. Ms. Maynard's treatment of the subject is not subtle but it does ring true.
•••
In "The Signal," author Ron Carlson sets an ominous tone from the very first sentence. The scene is the "Cold Creek trailhead," the protagonist is driving an "old blue Chevrolet"; there's a "ruined sign" and it's twilight in September. Mr. Carlson is a stylist; his way with words is the primary satisfaction of the story of Mack, a down on his luck ranch hand anxiously awaiting a long-planned camping trip reunion with his former wife, Vonnie. Her arrival intensifies the somber mood. "It's been a hideous year," she tells Mack, "and you hideous in it, but it's my word." She had promised him one last time together.
As Mack and Vonnie hike woods and trails full of wildlife and laden with memory, their story emerges. He had grown up working on the dude ranch run by his courtly and loving, competent father. Vonnie was a guest, the daughter of wealthy, Eastern parents. The two were attracted to each other but lost touch when she went off to Brown and he headed to Boise State. Later, they reconnected and married "in the dooryard of the home place … [with] three horses standing witness at the corral fence." At first they were "in love and poor and so fine, but then they wore out poor and they did some damage to love." The present and the past weave through the six days of Mack and Vonnie's mountain adventure as Mack's agenda for the trip, complicated by murky business dealings, goes wrong and violence erupts.
"The Signal's" plot is complex. Its characters, on the other hand, are static and flat. Mack describes himself as feeling like "a man washed up on the beach after trying to drown himself…." His father's unexpected death had left him "rudderless" and his pride is hurt by failure in business, but still his meltdown is hard to comprehend. Likewise, Vonnie's shifting moods are confusing because we don't really know her.
What does come through, vividly, is the author's exceptional feeling for the West and for the out of doors, a feeling he has given to his characters. "There was nothing," Mack notes one night, "between him and the four trillion stars except the unending waves of dark chill dropping steadily onto the mountain meadow." Such sentences make this short book, despite its shortcomings, a pleasure to read.
•••
Born in India, educated at Columbia and Oxford universities and now living in Mumbai, Aravind Adiga was awarded the 2008 Man Booker prize for his debut novel, "The White Tiger." He now follows it with a collection of loosely related stories also set in India at a precise time indicated by the book's title, "Between the Assassinations." In 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was gunned down by her bodyguards. Seven years later, her son Rajiv Gandhi, also serving as prime minister, was killed by Tamil separatists. Aravind's stories do not explicitly describe these events but they vividly evoke the chaotic, brutal world that spawned them. "Ever since Mrs. Gandhi died," one character observes, "this country has begun to fall apart."
The setting is Kittur, a fictional town on India's southwestern coast. Charts and chapter introductions that read like passages from a guidebook evoke the locale — the railway station, "dim, dirty, and littered with discarded lunch bags into which stray dogs poke their noses"; Umbrella Street, the heart of the commercial district, with its pornographic cinema, colonial-era arched gateway and famous ice-cream shop; "the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Maidan (formerly King George V Memorial Maidan)," a place that is the site of the first temple for the use of the Hoyka, the "backward caste" that makes up 24 percent of the town's population.
Each chapter is the story of one character — Ziauddin, a Muslim boy surviving on odd jobs in the murky underworld around Kittur's railway station; Chenayya, the young bicycle deliveryman killing himself with heavy loads, both physical and emotional; Abassi, the glib owner of a shirt factory who can "feel, between his fingers, the fine-spun fabric of corruption"; Souma, the little girl forced to beg so she can get drugs for her father; Ratna, the soft-hearted snake-oil salesman with three daughters to marry off; Murali, the aging Marxist who aspires to write like de Maupassant and realizes that "the Communists [are] finished." The stories pulse with energy, with color, with the odor of excrement and stale feet, elephants and dead cows, and with the subtleties of social interaction in a profoundly stratified society. They are disturbing but fascinating. Clearly, Aravind Adiga is a writer to watch.
• Stephanie Deutsch is a writer and critic in Washington.
The Miami Herald
Sun, Aug. 23, 2009
Labor Day. Joyce Maynard. Morrow. 256 pages.
At the heart of Joyce Maynard's latest novel sits a peach pie, the perfect emblem for this quintessentially American morality tale, with its preoccupations of family and decency. The book offers life lessons: in parenting, loyalty, the enduring power of love -- and how to achieve a perfect crust, even during a heat wave.
The story's physical extent is short, its sentiments simple, but Maynard has worked her ingredients carefully -- a pinch of quirkiness here, a measure of sentimentality there -- and the outcome is guaranteed to satisfy readers with an appetite for sweetness.
The narrator, Henry, looks back almost two decades, to a hot holiday weekend in his 13th year when he and his eccentric, divorced, probably depressed mother Adele are shopping in Pricemart. Henry finds himself in conversation with Frank, a tall man who is bleeding, and in the first of the book's multiple celebrations of innocence, they take him home.
In fact, Frank is a convicted murderer just escaped from prison, but as jailbirds go, he is the extreme antithesis of hardened. Indeed, he's more domesticated than Adele and is soon to be found cooking chili, waxing floors and doing the ironing. His one threatening act, early on, is to tie up Adele, but he does it erotically, using soft silk scarves. Soon the adults are lovers.
Through the thin walls of the house, pubescent Henry can hear Frank and Adele's passion, which only deepens the boy's confusion about sex recently made manifest in uncontrollable developments within his own body. But Frank befriends Henry too, teaching him motor maintenance and how to catch a baseball. Frank is the role model Henry needs, now that the boy's father has a new wife and child and only appears for ritual Saturday dinners at Friendly's.
Family has been a preoccupation of Maynard through several books, most recently Internal Combustion, the nonfiction account of a seemingly happy marriage disrupted by murder. Conversely, in Labor Day, she wickedly upends the Rockwellian portrait of what a family should look like, putting a jail-breaking wife-slayer at its heroic center. It's an ironic moment to cherish before the book shifts gear.
Because idylls can't last, certainly not in novels with a didactic purpose. There's that slough of despond to be visited before arriving at the celestial city. And so, with a sense of grinding machinery, Maynard has Frank reveal the circumstances of his incarceration. Now the sunny scenario turns Manichean, becoming a vampish story of duplicitous sex-pots and appalling, implausible tragedies. Frank's real crime, it emerges, is unworldliness, an excess of innocence and trust. And Henry is about to fall into the same trap, after suspecting that Adele and Frank are planning to run away to Canada without him. He confides in Eleanor, a new friend with an eating disorder and a cynical take on sexuality, who articulates Henry's Oedipal dilemma regarding Frank: ``Either you get rid of him. Or he gets rid of you.''
Who gets rid of whom, how, where and for how long is the business of the rather more condensed final third of a novel now straining to conclude its moral equation: misjudgment + repentance = restoration (eventually). The pattern of starkly shaded secondary female characters who deliver the novel's misdeeds holds up, allowing Maynard to depict her menfolk more as victims than venal, survivors of poor choices who learn sorrow and regret, before routinely achieving redemption in the final act.
And that's where the peach pie makes its curtain call, representing not only all that's wholesome, enduring, wise and true but also much, much more: salvation, reconnection, an almost magical healing balm. Now that's some recipe. Move over, Martha.
Elsbeth Lindner is a writer in London.
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Serving Northern Michigan
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Maynard's novel is compelling
By CAROL DEEGAN
"Labor Day" (William Morrow. 244 pages. $24.99), by Joyce Maynard.
It's the long Labor Day weekend in Holton Mills, N.H., in the mid-1980s, and
13-year-old Henry and his mother, Adele, have nothing special planned.
That's not unusual. Adele doesn't like to leave the house, though Henry wishes
they'd get out more. She works at home, selling vitamins over the phone, and
hasn't really dated since Henry's dad divorced her. But Henry, who is about to
enter the seventh grade, needs a new pair of pants. So Adele decides to go
shopping at their local Pricemart.
That's when everything changes for Adele and Henry in Joyce Maynard's "Labor
Day," a story so compelling, many readers will finish it in one sitting. And
then read it again.
Henry, a budding adolescent, is reading Cosmopolitan magazine while his mother
shops when a stranger approaches him. The stranger tells Henry that he needs a
ride — to his house. Henry notices the man's pants are bloody. ("I fell out a
window," the stranger — who later introduces himself as Frank — explains.)
Other people's mothers would have refused Frank's request on the spot, or at
least asked a question or two. But Adele isn't like other people's mothers. She
agrees to take him home with them.
It turns out that Frank has escaped from prison. (He jumped out a second-floor
hospital window.) He holds Adele hostage, but only briefly — and very tenderly.
Frank is attentive to Adele, plays catch with Henry and even bakes a peach pie.
He also finds his way into Adele's heart.
Henry is happy that Frank is in the picture. But when Frank and Adele begin
making plans to leave town, Henry assumes that he'll be left behind. ("All this
time I'd been picturing how now it would be the three of us together, like when
we played catch in the yard, only really, it was going to be the two of them.")
"Labor Day" is a page-turner, from the beginning lines, when Henry describes how
his father left him and his mother for a new wife and family, to the final
chapters, when Henry is a grown man.
Maynard, author of "To Die For," is in top form in this tale of love, betrayal
and forgiveness.
July 26, 2009
Modern Love
By JOYCE MAYNARD
AS hard as it was sometimes caring for my children when they were little, back in those days I at least stood a reasonable chance of protecting my sons and daughter from pain and loss. The hard part hits later, when — fiercely as you love this person and desperately as you may worry — you can’t come to your child’s rescue. Worse, what you imagined you were doing to protect her may actually end up inflicting another form of injury, as my actions easily could have, in what happened between my daughter and me in the story I tell here.
It was the fall of 2001, and the world felt like a particularly dangerous place. My children were grown and out on their own — one son at college, the other bumming around West Africa. My daughter, Audrey, 22, had left to spend six months volunteering with a women’s organization in a poor town in the Dominican Republic.
Not long after Audrey started living in Barahona she e-mailed that she had met a young man, Johnny, who ran a kind of taxi service, offering rides on the back of his motorcycle. He had given her a lift.
She didn’t tell me much, but I knew Johnny had come to the Dominican Republic from Haiti in search of a better life. Audrey said he was handsome, smart, funny, a great dancer and wonderful to her. Within a month she wrote to say she was in love.
Then nothing. Unable to reach Audrey at her rented room, I sent breezy news reports, casual questions. “How’s Johnny?” Then, “I’m worried.”
Finally, I tracked her down by calling the neighbors’ house. Even on that line filled with static I could tell something was wrong. Her voice, usually so lively, sounded wary and defensive: “I just can’t talk now. There’s a lot going on.”
Weeks passed. More silence. Or — almost worse — flat-sounding, one-line e-mail messages: “Will write later. Don’t worry.”
But I worried all the time now, more even than when I got the message from my son in Africa: “I’m over the worst of the malaria now.” He was writing to me, at least. From Audrey, nothing.
In early spring — six months since I had seen her last — I dreamed my daughter was running down a dirt road, with her long braid flying behind her and her face a mask of grief. The dream felt real.
That morning I knew what I would do, though I feared my daughter might never forgive me.
For years I had known the password to her e-mail account but never used it. Now — hands trembling on the keyboard — I typed it in.
Slowly, then, in messages she had written to friends, the story unfolded.
She and Johnny had gone for their H.I.V. test that December. Two weeks later: A clean bill of health for Audrey. But the man my daughter believed to be the love of her life was H.I.V. positive. Back then, for an undocumented Haitian living in the Dominican Republic, the medical services necessary to keep him alive would be available only at a cost beyond his means.
It got worse. They had mostly been careful, but not 100 percent. And the test results Audrey got could not be viewed as accurate until three months had passed.
Feeling as though the room was on fire, I scrolled through the messages my daughter had written over the weeks since then (with my own hopeful, plaintive notes scattered throughout: “Tell me what’s going on! I miss you, honey!”). There were letters to the American embassy inquiring about Johnny emigrating to the United States if he were married to an American citizen. Letters inquiring about the options for treatment for both of them back home. If she came home.
But for the moment, Audrey was still living with Johnny. Loving a man with whom she could not make love. Uncertain of her own health.
All I wanted, reading this news, was to jump on the first plane to the Dominican Republic, throw my arms around my daughter. Only to do so, I would have to admit to having done this terrible thing.
When I was very young, my mother read my diary. And though I loved my mother, I don’t think I ever forgave her. Now I had opened my daughter’s e-mail account so I could know the truth, and the truth had brought nothing but terror and the awareness of my own powerlessness.
Two months after discovering her secret, I broke into my daughter’s e-mail account one last time. That was the day I learned she’d had the second H.I.V. test and was O.K. I promised myself I would never again violate her that way.
The person I picked up at the airport looked different from the one I’d put on the plane eight months before. Audrey had been to a place that no one in our family would ever know or fully be able to imagine. As we drove over the Golden Gate Bridge to our comfortable Marin County home, it appeared to me as though my daughter, the most hopeful person I knew, was not just tired but weary of life.
In the days that followed, she told her brothers and me little of her time abroad, and almost nothing of Johnny or the one-room shack they had shared, though one day she called him, and afterward her face was streaked with tears.
I had recently purchased a 20-year-old Mercedes convertible — my first non-Mom car. Now I made Audrey a proposal: to take a road trip — top down — all the way up the coast to the border of British Columbia. I was headed to see the man who was my boyfriend. Though really, the only destination that mattered to me was reaching what I took to be the dark and broken place in my daughter’s heart. If she would just tell me what I already knew, I could offer comfort at last.
But she was understandably dubious about this trip. We had a history of stormy times, particularly when traveling.
“I don’t know about this plan, Mama,” she said. “I feel like being mellow for a while.”
I told her we’d take as long as we wanted. I had only one agenda, but I didn’t talk about that. So we packed our gear and hit the road. We had hiking shoes, backpacks, maps to hot springs, some of her music, some of mine.
North we went through Mendocino and into Oregon. One afternoon we sat naked in a hot spring for nearly three hours in silence. On the Oregon coast we took off our shoes and ran on the dunes. We stayed at a tourist cabin in Washington, where I bought Audrey a painted fungus of a cabin by a field in the woods that reminded us of our old house in New Hampshire. The simple days, or that’s how I remembered them.
And then we were within an hour of our destination — the ferry in Port Townsend, Wash., where Audrey and I would say goodbye. She was taking a bus south to visit college friends, though I imagined that her old life felt very distant now.
Even now, I can picture the stretch of road we were driving at that moment, and I remember the ballad Van Morrison was singing as we traveled it.
“I want to tell you something, Mama,” she said. “It might make you mad.”
“There’s nothing you can’t say to me,” I told her, gathering breath.
“This is a very hard thing.”
I pulled the car over onto the shoulder and turned off the engine. I held my daughter’s hand and felt the beating of my heart.
“Back in the winter,” she began, “Johnny and I took this test.”
There was not a lot to be said. I told her I’d do whatever I could to help, but I knew the problems my daughter had faced, those last months, were no longer the kind a parent can fix.
The ferry at Port Townsend was next to the place where Audrey would catch the bus, so we rode together right up to the landing. Out of the trunk of the Mercedes I lifted her backpack and hat, the painted fungus, a bag of raw almonds for the long bus ride and two $20 bills — all the things a mother gives her child when there is something else the child needs that’s nowhere to be found.
After we said goodbye, I drove the car onto the ferry and climbed out, so I could stand on deck as the boat motored out of the harbor.
It would take six years for me to tell my daughter how I’d broken into her e-mail account. Understandably, she felt betrayed. She managed to forgive me — not only forgive me, but allow me to tell this story. Fiercely loyal as she is to the suffering people of Haiti, she asked that I clarify it was in the Dominican Republic, not in Haiti, that Johnny contracted H.I.V. Not all the bad things in the Caribbean happen in Haiti, she reminded me.
And one more thing she would say, after hearing me describe my anguish over those many months, and my obsession with making everything all right for her, when of course I couldn’t: “I wasn’t really that broken person you pictured. By the time I got home from my time in the D.R., I’d worked through a lot of the most difficult parts of this experience. I was in a stronger place for the lessons I’d learned.”
Over the years since, Audrey has gone three times to Haiti. She has accompanied Johnny to Dr. Paul Farmer’s life-saving clinic in the mountains, and Johnny is alive. She has fallen in love a few times, gone to graduate school to pursue the path of school counseling. This summer, she will return once more to Port-au-Prince.
“You don’t need to try and fix my life any more, Mama,” she tells me. “I can handle that part on my own.”
It is a lesson long in the learning, though the first intimations of this came to me that summer day seven years ago, when I stood on the deck of the ferry to catch a last glimpse of my daughter waving to me from the shore, with her pink hat and long braid and her wide, bright smile. We stood that way, waving, for a long time, as the boat moved steadily away from land — she in one country, I heading toward another, until she was just a dot on the horizon, same as I must have been to her.
We were off to live our lives.
Joyce Maynard lives in California. Her latest novel, “Labor Day,” will be published July 28 by William Morrow.