Stern Men: A Novel - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Elizabeth Gilbert is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Big Magic, Eat Pray Love, and The Signature of All Things, as well as several other internationally bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her latest novel, City of Girls, comes out in June, 2019.

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Praise for Stern Men

“Rich as drawn butter and as comical as the crawly crustacean itself . . . Gilbert has penned a Dickensian tale; one wishes it ran in two volumes.”—USA Today

“Beautifully wrought and very funny . . . Gilbert’s tangy language has as much music as muscle; the novel is Emersonian in its clarity and Austenian in its sly social observations.”

—Mirabella

“While Elizabeth Gilbert is not the first writer to suggest that smart women have much to teach stern men, she puts the idea forward with rugged power.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“This funny, clever, and wise novel, filled with well-developed characters who are more than eccentric stereotypes, moves [Gilbert] squarely to the forefront of writers to watch.”

—The Seattle Times

“A wonderful novel that will have you laughing out loud, Stern Men is an admirable debut from a writer obviously destined for literary longevity. Like Tyler and Irving (and Joseph Heller, Stanley Elkin, and Alice Hoffman) Gilbert has a gift for comic fiction that conveys serious issues. And like those writers, Gilbert will most certainly be around for a long time to come.”—The Denver Post

“Gilbert’s storytelling brio and keen intelligence prove irresistible.” —New York Newsday

PENGUIN BOOKS

STERN MEN

Elizabeth Gilbert began her writing journey with two acclaimed works of fiction: the short story collection Pilgrims, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the novel Stern Men, a New York Times Notable Book. These were followed by three works of nonfiction: The Last American Man, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and two memoirs, Eat, Pray, Love and Committed, both of which were number one New York Times bestsellers. Gilbert’s work has been published in more than thirty languages. In 2008, Time magazine named her one of the one hundred most influential people in the world. She lives in Frenchtown, New Jersey. Her Web site is www.elizabethgilbert.com.

To access Penguin Readers Guides online, visit our Web sites at www.penguin.com or www.vpbookclub.com.

BOOKS BY ELIZABETH GILBERT

Pilgrims

Stern Men

The Last American Man

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

Committed: A Love Story

The Signature of All Things

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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A Penguin Random House Company

First published in the United States of America by Houghton Mifflin 2000

Published in Penguin Books 2009

Copyright © 2000 by Elizabeth Gilbert

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

ISBN: 978-1-101-01487-5

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

EPILOGUE

Acknowledgments

To Sarah Chalfant.
For everything.

In an aquarium at Woods Hole in the summer of 1892, a conch was placed in the same tank with a female lobster, which was nearly ten inches long, and which had been in captivity about eight weeks. The conch, which was of average size, was not molested for several days, but at last, when hard pressed by hunger, the lobster attacked it, broke off its shell, piece by piece, and made quick work of the soft parts.

—The American Lobster: A Study of Its Habits and Development

Francis Hobart Herrick, Ph.D., 1895

Prologue

TWENTY MILES out from the coast of Maine, Fort Niles Island and Courne Haven Island face off—two old bastards in a staring contest, each convinced he is the other’s only guard. Nothing else is near them. They are among nobody. Rocky and potato-shaped, they form an archipelago of two. Finding these twin islands on a map is a most unexpected discovery; like finding twin towns on a prairie, twin encampments on a desert, twin huts on a tundra. So isolated from the rest of the world, Fort Niles Island and Courne Haven Island are separated from each other by only a fast gut of seawater, known as Worthy Channel. Worthy Channel, nearly a mile wide, is so shallow in parts at low tide that unless you knew what you were doing—unless you really knew what you were doing—you might hesitate to cross it even in a canoe.

In their specific geography, Fort Niles Island and Courne Haven Island are so astonishingly similar that their creator must have been either a great simpleton or a great comic. They are almost exact duplicates. The islands—the last peaks of the same ancient, sunken mountain chain—are made from the same belt of quality black granite, obscured by the same cape of lush spruce. Each island is approximately four miles long and two miles wide. Each has a handful of small coves, a number of freshwater ponds, a scattering of rocky beaches, a single sandy beach, a single great hill, and a single deep harbor, held possessively behind its back, like a hidden sack of cash.

On each island, there is a church and a schoolhouse. Down by the harbor is a main street (called, on each island, Main Street), with a tiny cluster of public buildings—post office, grocer, tavern. There are no paved roads to be found on either island. The houses on the islands are much alike, and the boats in the harbors are identical. The islands share the same pocket of interesting weather, significantly warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer than any coastal town, and they often find themselves trapped within the same spooky bank of fog. The same species of fern, orchid, mushroom, and wild rose can be found on both islands. And, finally, these islands are populated by the same breeds of birds, frogs, deer, rats, foxes, snakes, and men.

The Penobscot Indians left the first human records on Fort Niles and Courne Haven. They found the islands an excellent source of sea fowl eggs, and the ancient stone weapons of these early visitors still show up in certain coves. The Penobscot didn’t long remain so far out in the middle of the sea, but they did use the islands as temporary fishing stations, a practice picked up handily in the early seventeenth century by the French.

The first permanent settlers of Fort Niles and Courne Haven were two Dutch brothers, Andreas and Walter Van Heuvel, who, after taking their wives and children and livestock out to the islands in June of 1702, laid claim to one island for each family. They called their settlements Bethel and Canaan. The foundation of Walter Van Heuvel’s home remains, a moss-covered pile of rock in a meadow on what he called Canaan Island—the exact site, in fact, of Walter’s murder at...