Word: matriarchate
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Family and Friends suggests just how difficult this art can be. The novel takes the form of a recollection, a family saga about a rich matriarch and her four temperamental children. The Dorns have left Europe (perhaps Germany in the early '30s) to establish a manufacturing business in London. They prosper, even though the elder Dorn dies prematurely and leaves Wife Sofka to turn Alfred, Frederick, Mimi and Betty into proper gentlemen and ladies. But there is only so much a mother can do. Alfred is a somber bibliophile destined to run the business and refute the opening line...
TYLER'S OFTEN CYNICAL view of homelife is especially irreverent in its treatment of motherhood. Displaced from their traditionally sacred realm, mothers are often associated with neglectful absence. Homesick Restaurant opens with the dying words of the matriarch Pearl, whose children--haunted by guilt for their own inability to forgive--cannot escape even in her death the repressive intimidation she tormented them with in life. Following her death, Ezra, Pearl's favorite, becomes a kind of surrogate mother, collecting the family together for the homemade dinners their mother never provided and taking it upon himself to keep up at least...
...casting would have aroused excitement on Broadway. Joanne Woodward as Amanda Wingfield, the desperate matriarch. Karen Allen, star of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Starman, as the soulful daughter Laura. TV Star James Naughton (Trauma Center, Planet of the Apes) as Laura's "gentleman caller." And John Sayles, filmmaker (Return of the Secaucus Seven) and novelist (Union Dues), making his professional stage debut as Tom, the restless, seething son who narrates Tennessee Williams' doom-struck "memory play" about his family. Add a designer who has won a Tony nomination, a director who has mounted more than 100 productions...
Irony serves to sharpen, and humor leaven, the mishaps that befall the book's eccentric families. Unrelentingly bleak, however, are the descriptions of cruelty to children, which are a hallmark of Gallant's stories in Home Truths. Indeed, with a mother like the matriarch in Saturday, there is no need to blame family tensions on Canada's ethnic problems. "She told each of her five daughters as they grew up that they were conceived in horror; that she could have left them in their hospital cots and not looked back, so sickened was she by their limp spines...
Cooper's and Lucy's fondest hope is to reunite Jack and Kitty, once the Astaire and Rogers of their set. In keeping with the deflected dreams of the rest of the crowd, Kitty has been married three times and has become a prematurely old, discreetly tipsy Florida matriarch. Jack, who wed the girl he made pregnant in Georgetown days, is the boyishly charming and faintly untrustworthy Lieutenant Governor of Indiana. After much mischance, Jack and Kitty do return to Buffalo, the Snow Ball and each other's arms. The climax is, predictably, anticlimax, a sad proof that...