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Searching... Salem Main Library | LP Godwin, G. | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Ten-year-old Helen and her summer guardian, Flora, are isolated together in Helen's decaying family house while her father is doing secret war work in Oak Ridge during the final months of World War II.At three Helen lost her mother and the beloved grandmother who raised her has just died. A fiercely imaginative child, Helen is desperate to keep her house intact with all its ghosts and stories. Flora, her late mother's twenty-two-year old first cousin, who cries at the drop of a hat, is ardently determined to do her best for Helen. Their relationship and its fallout, played against a backdrop of a lost America will haunt Helen for the rest of her life.In this, Gail Godwin's fourteenth novel, she evokes shades of The Turn of the Screw as she explores inequality of relationships between adults and children in a taut, subtle and moving tale of love, regret, and the things we can't undo.
Author Notes
Gail Godwin was born on June 18, 1937, in Birmingham, Ala. and graduated from the University of North Carolina and University of Iowa. Godwin writes about strong women, a perspective she gathered from her own life. After her father abandoned her at an early age, she was raised by her mother and grandmother. Her father eventually returned on the day of her high school graduation and she lived with him for a brief period before he ultimately shot and killed himself.
Godwin worked as a reporter for The Miami Herald, and later as a travel consultant before achieving her fame as a writer. Godwin's novels are about contemporary women, frequently Southern, who search for meaning in their lives. In Glass People, the heroine is a beautiful woman who learns that her husband is merely obsessed with her beauty and unconcerned about her as a person. Other popular titles include The Odd Woman and The Good Husband. Godwin has been the recipient of several honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
New York Review of Books Review
ORPHANS have long been a boon to literature. Part of their appeal is pragmatic: they're good for plot (parents have such a pesky habit of squelching adventure). But they're also ideal exemplars of a certain universal experience, what the writer Francis Spufford has called "the situation of abandonment." In his memoir, "The Child That Books Built," he says this experience "focuses a self-pity that everyone wants to feel sometimes," and expresses "the solitude humans discover as we grow up no matter how well our kinship systems work." In other words, we're all orphans at one time or another, at least in our hearts. Gail Godwin's 14th novel, "Flora," offers a veritable taxonomy of orphans: from the conventional, both-parents-died variety to the quasi-orphan (one parent still nominally in the picture) to the elective orphan (a runaway) to the reverse-orphan (a parent unmoored by the loss of a child). In fact, as the story unfolds, we realize it's populated almost exclusively by orphans of different stripes. It's a mark of Godwin's light, sure touch that this doesn't feel contrived. On the contrary, it begins to feel natural, inevitable that beneath the surface of any individual we'll find a lonesome soul, cut adrift. Spiritually adrift, that is. "Flora" doesn't belong to the venerable orphan-as-wanderer tradition; its lineage can't be traced to Dickens or Dahl. In fact it's a doggedly stationary tale. Our protagonist is rooted firmly at home, waiting out a polio scare on a mountaintop in North Carolina. It's the summer of 1945. Helen Anstruther is 10. Her mother died of pneumonia when Helen was 3. Her beloved paternal grandmother has just died during the past spring, her heart giving out while she tried on an Easter hat. Helen's father still walks the earth - for what that's worth. He's ditched her for the summer, having gone off to do secret war work at Oak Ridge in Tennessee. Not that his presence is entirely missed. When home, he's generally burning the grilled cheese, getting sloshed on Jack Daniel's and making acerbic remarks. Flora, her mother's 22-year-old cousin, comes to be Helen's summertime companion. Having just completed a teacher training program, she takes rather too earnestly to her role as temporary guardian, toting sacks of flour and cornmeal, a tin cake box, an entire ham all the way from Alabama. "She was the first older person I felt superior to," Helen reflects. "This had its gratifying moments but also its worrisome side." Flora is a fullfledged orphan, abandoned in infancy by a "trashy" mother, then at age 15 losing her father when he was "shot between the eyes during a poker game." Godwin complicates the caregiver dynamic by making young Helen an officious despot ("Already I was learning how effectively she could be managed by a simple look of disdain," she confesses after Flora's been in the house less than an hour), while Flora flutters around full of deference and praise. Better yet, Godwin complicates this dynamic by revealing how "simple-hearted" Flora will always have a leg up on Helen. Literally: as a child, she shared a bed with Helen's mother, and loves to tell how she'd sleep with one leg flung over the bigger girl, "so she wouldn't abandon her." Helen's mother was yet another orphan, having lost her parents to the flu epidemic at age 8. Taken in by Flora's father, she became, Flora rhapsodizes, "a little mother to me." Ready for a few more orphans? There's Finn, the recently discharged soldier who delivers groceries to this female household on top of the hill; he was adopted by relatives. ("Did your parents die?" Helen asks. "No," he replies, "but they had five kids and no money, and my father's cousin and his wife had money but no kids.") There's also Rachel Huff, Helen's friend from fifth grade, whose father might be away doing war work - but might not actually exist. By summer's end, Rachel and her mother will have "vanished into thin air." There's even the little girl in the mystery program Helen and Flora listen to on the radio. She gets separated from her mother in a department store only to join the community of the mannequins. "In their world, they tell her, she can never get lost or feel abandoned again." And there's Helen's grandmother Nonie, the closest thing to a mother the girl has ever known, whose presence fills these pages even after her death. Helen conjures memories of her voice dispensing "soldierly counsel" and feels her spirit presiding throughout the old house, "which pulsed with her stories." Nonie too had been a kind of stray, an orphan-by-choice with fairy tale overtones, having fled at age 18 from "the farm and her greedy new stepmother and menacing stepbrother." When Helen receives a monogrammed suitcase for her birthday, her father sardonically suggests flight from home is her legacy. "Ah, now you're one of us," he proclaims. Then, lest she miss the point: "Now you can run away." Nonie's passing doesn't exactly summon any latent fatherly instincts. The day she dies, he delivers the news bluntly, "Mother is gone," then warns, "Don't ask me what we're going to do next because I don't know." And the evening after the funeral, before lurching upstairs with his drink: "I probably shouldn't say this, Helen, but I look forward to the day when you can spot the unsavory truths about human nature for yourself." What parenting! What orphaning! No wonder Helen feels "I had to fight to keep from losing the little I had been left with, including my sense of myself." And, given their mutual proximity in isolation, no wonder the primary person she fights with is Flora, whose unfitness as a sparring partner only stokes Helen's fury. For most of the book, not much happens in the house on the mountaintop. Helen fantasizes about what her father might say if he wrote her a letter or surprised her with a visit. In old age, she'll recall it as having been "for the most part a boring, exasperating summer" - by any reckoning, a risky proposition for a novel. But Godwin makes use of the older Helen's voice to dispense snatches of foreboding. We understand that we're creeping toward some calamity, whose unpredictable nature is precisely what keeps us reading. Remorse, we learn, is a word that will come to haunt the adult Helen. But she's graced by a more hopeful "re-" word, too: recovery. Before her birth, the house on the mountaintop served as a convalescent home for "tuberculars or inebriates, and occasional souls whose nerves weren't yet up to going back to ordinary life." Helen has grown up hearing Nonie's stories about these fragile, fragmented people, and she likes to imagine their lingering presence, to sense herself in their company as they read and play cards on the porches. "Sometimes," she fancies, "the Recoverers were there, the ones from her stories, discussing their rates of improvement as the sun passed over the house." 'Mother is gone,' the heroines father says. 'Don't ask me what we're going to do next because I don't know.' Leah Hager Cohen's new nonfiction book, "I Don't Know," will be published in the fall.