Catching Heaven - Hardcover

Hall, Sands

 
9780345439703: Catching Heaven
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0345439708 ISBN 13: 9780345439703
Verlag: Ballantine Books, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

After a commercial audition leads to a severe anxiety attack, Maud Maxwell packs her candlesticks, Navajo wall hangings, and wooden spoons and flees Los Angeles, her stagnant relationship, and a faltering acting career. While driving along a lonely two-lane desert highway, she wonders: Where is the perfect love, the children, the security of a grounded life? Maud believes the answer lies in Marengo, a small town outside Santa Fe, where her sister Lizzie resides. Now Marengo beckons to Maud like the North Star on a dark night.
Yet Maud's life seems glamorous to Lizzie, who longs for the kind of motion that sweeps her sister from city to city, realizing her art. Everyone had always assumed Lizzie would be a successful artist. But instead of fame, she had three children by three different fathers. Instead of Paris, she settled in Marengo, teaching and painting pictures for a greeting card company.
But Maud is not the only one drawn to Marengo. Jake Arboles has returned home after spending two years in Nashville trying to break into the songwriting business. He and Lizzie were balanced on the edge of commitment until their relationship ended abruptly - loss that has haunted them both ever since.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Sands Hall received her B.A. in drama from the University of California, Irvine, and attended the Advanced Training Program at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop and a second MFA in theatre arts from the University of Iowa. She has worked extensively as an actor, including seasons with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, the Old Globe Theatre, the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival, and the Foothill Theatre Company, where she also writes and directs. She teaches in the University of California at Davis Extension Programs, for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and for the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.

Sands Hall teaches at the University of California at Davis, the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.

Aus dem Klappentext

ercial audition leads to a severe anxiety attack, Maud Maxwell packs her candlesticks, Navajo wall hangings, and wooden spoons and flees Los Angeles, her stagnant relationship, and a faltering acting career. While driving along a lonely two-lane desert highway, she wonders: Where is the perfect love, the children, the security of a grounded life? Maud believes the answer lies in Marengo, a small town outside Santa Fe, where her sister Lizzie resides. Now Marengo beckons to Maud like the North Star on a dark night.<br><br>Yet Maud's life seems glamorous to Lizzie, who longs for the kind of motion that sweeps her sister from city to city, realizing her art. Everyone had always assumed Lizzie would be a successful artist. But instead of fame, she had three children by three different fathers. Instead of Paris, she settled in Marengo, teaching and painting pictures for a greeting card company.<br><br>But Maud is not the only one drawn to Marengo. Jake Arboles has returned home after spending t

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MAUD

I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world

RICHARD II

The sky was still dark when Maud closed the motel door behind her.
Shivering, she crossed the street to the twenty-four-hour restaurant and
bought a cup of coffee from a yawning waitress. She'd left the freeway
late the day before, turning east onto a two-lane highway. Now it unfurled
ahead of her headlights, which she kept on high beam except for the rare
times a truck or car approached. She thought how like eyes the bright
lights coming at her were, and how easy it would be to swerve into their
oncoming glare.

An hour after dawn, a small town rose like a mirage out of the Arizona
desert. Maud passed the flickering sign of a burger stand, a gas station,
a battered motel before pulling in at Maria's Trading Post, whose
attractions--GAS! MUTTON! NAILS! FLOUR!--were advertised on a hand-lettered
sandwich board at the edge of the road.

The gas tanks were round-topped, old-fashioned. There seemed to be no
expectation that she pay before pumping the gas. The latch on the trigger
was broken. As Maud leaned against her car, holding the nozzle in the fill
hole, she had another wince of memory. Actually, it was more than a wince,
the rearranging of her shoulders she'd had to do when images of the
Cheesios audition, of Miles, of Nikos' acting class leered towards her as
she drove. A fragment of one of the days she'd worked on Tucker's Larks
pushed at her. When she'd filmed her short though vital scene with Tucker,
the actor hadn't actually been present. He was in Chicago playing baseball
for a handicapped children's benefit--they planned to film his lines later.
"Virtual Tucker," a crew member joked. In the sterile, muted space of a
police interrogation room that was the set, Maud emoted her half of the
scene to the plaid shoulder of the cameraman. Off to one side, the
scriptgirl read Tucker's dialogue in a flat, nasal voice. "Wait a bit
after each line," the director coached Maud. "I know that's tough, given
the, like, highly charged context of the scene, but we can't have any
overlap."

The trigger beneath her finger clicked. Maud pulled at it a few more
times, watching the numbers on the gas pump inch by. This
isn't acting, she'd wanted to tell the people gathered in the room,
wielding boom mikes, lights, makeup brushes. She replaced the nozzle in
its slot in the gas pump. I will not keep this form upon my head,
Constance, pulling at her hair, tells King John just before she exits and
goes mad. When there is such disorder in my wit.

The wind pushed out of the desert, flattening her skirt against her legs.
Maud closed her eyes before its chafing warmth, holding her hair back from
her face with fingers that smelled of gasoline. --'tis an unwanted
garden--no, that wasn't right--'tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed.
Fie on't, ah fie.

A large yellow car with fins, parked askew, guarded the door to Maria's
Trading Post. Its back seat was filled with newspapers. Both taillights
were broken, and the paint above the tire wells badly rusted.
The screen door screeched as she opened it, activating several buzzing
flies. A man leaned against the counter, watching a woman hack with a
cleaver at a glistening haunch of meat. On his cheek was a constellation
of pockmarks--a swirl, a small galaxy of indented scars. The door slapped
shut.

"Sorry," Maud said, using a French accent.

The woman gestured with the cleaver. "But get that car to Sara anyway."
It took a moment for Maud to realize that this instruction was not meant
for her. The man leveled dark eyes in her direction, then went back to
brooding on the skinned carcass. Maud made out angles of marbled fat and
blood that might have been part of a leg, cut off above the knee. A cowboy hat
sat beside this on the counter, jaunty, incongruent. She turned away, into an aisle, walking past huge cans of chili and hominy, cellophane packages of HoHos, boxes of cornflakes and saltines, loaves of Wonder bread. She stared at a shelf that held polyester shorts and sneakers, wondering if this man and this woman held their pockmarked faces against her, her and her kind.

"Need help?" the woman called.

Desperately, Maud thought. "Merci," she said. "I am just looking." She
didn't know why she'd started with the French accent but she didn't know
how to stop now. She stared down into hunched burlap sacks of flour,
beans, dried corn that stood at the back of the store. After searching for
an apple or an orange, she settled for a package of sunflower seeds from a
dusty display next to the cash register. She handed a twenty to the woman.
"I would take this, please. And I put the fifteen dollars of the gas in
the car." Her ability to use a French accent had always been rather
dismal. The woman looked at her sharply before lifting a cash box up from
beneath the counter.

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Verlag
Ballantine Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2000
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345439708
ISBN 13 
9780345439703
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
374
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780345440006: Catching Heaven: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0345440005 ISBN 13:  9780345440006
Verlag: Ballantine Books, 2001
Softcover