Goldengrove a telling portrait of death and coming-of-age
By JEFFREY ANN GOUDIE
Special to The Star
Francine Prose is a cultural presence: novelist, nonfiction writer, critic, translator, president of the PEN American Center and chairwoman of the panel that awarded the 2007 National Book Award in Fiction.
Her last book was the 2006 best-seller Reading Like a Writer. Her last novel was 2005’s A Changed Man, about a skinhead who undergoes a change of heart and head, a Pygmalion story of sorts. My brother-in-law’s father, who happens to be Jewish, quipped that it should have been titled My Fair Nazi.
Prose’s new novel, Goldengrove, is another Pygmalion story with a twist.
Here the reviewer squirms about how to give a sense of the atmosphere and substance of the novel without giving away the plot. One of the many essays Prose has written is called “Giveaways,” published in The New York Times Book Review several years ago. In it, Prose laments how often book reviewers give away too much of the plot in their reviews.
That said, Prose’s 15th novel is about a family’s quiet implosion after the loss by drowning of the oldest daughter. It is narrated by 13-year-old Nico, named by her aging hippie parents for a doomed German rock singer.
Margaret was the shimmering older sister, prone to romantic enthusiasms: vintage clothing, “mid-century modern” décor, jazz music and classic movies. Possessed of a beautiful singing voice, she was headed to Oberlin on a full music scholarship.
Besides Nico, who becomes the doubly iconic “Only Remaining Child” by death instead of college, there is her father, owner of a bookstore called Goldengrove (from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, as is the name Margaret), and her mother, who writes liner notes for classic music CDs.
The family lives on the algae-threatened Mirror Lake in upstate New York.
During the summer after Margaret’s tragic drowning, the family fractures, then comes together in a reconfigured mosaic. Nico surreptitiously meets with her sister’s devastated artist boyfriend, Aaron. Her mother takes a leave from her job and slips into a prescription-drug-induced fog. Her father immerses himself in his book about end-of-the-world beliefs and believers.
Nico understands her handsome father’s attraction to doomsday cults: “ … my father’s subject was the apocalypse and not the ragged hole that one death could rip in a few fragile lives.”
Prose’s perceptive novel sensitively treats grief, complete with “magical thinking.” Nico feels she’s being guided by Margaret into her flirtation with Aaron. Coaxing her to wear a favorite shirt of Margaret’s, he wants to transform her into her dead sister (Pygmalion, twisted).
But despite its perceptiveness and smartness — it’s laced with references to art, movies and music — this novel never quite leaves the page.
Perhaps that’s because of its melancholy subject. But something else may be at work. Prose has been criticized for her satirical streak. And although there are glimmers of that here — a DARE instructor named Officer Prozak and the tentative title of the father’s book, Eschatology for Dummies — this novel is mostly deadly (sorry for the pun) earnest. Prose might have loosened her reins.
As it is, she keeps her characters too much in control. One yearns for the spiky Vincent from A Changed Man. These characters flirt with, but never succumb to, the dark depths that follow in the aftermath of sudden death. The voice of the first-person, 13-year-old narrator may have limited Prose’s range and depth (there are some abrupt end-book sections from the point-of-view of grown-up Nico).
One reads literary fiction to be transported. Goldengrove is a bit too controlled for that.
Still, as a smart and sensitive exploration of one family’s response to the regret and recriminations that follow unexpected death, Goldengrove succeeds. Even if it doesn’t soar.
Goldengrove, by Francine Prose (275 pages; HarperCollins; $24.95)
Jeffrey Ann Goudie is a columnist and freelance reviewer living in Topeka.
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