Family Happiness: A Novel - Softcover

Colwin, Laurie

 
9780593313541: Family Happiness: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593313542 ISBN 13: 9780593313541
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

From the acclaimed author of Home Cooking comes a heartfelt novel about a midlife crisis and a woman tired of being taken for granted—and a reminder that family, like happiness, can take many forms.

“Colwin wrings magic from ordinary lives.” —Entertainment Weekly

To the rest of the world, Polly Solo-Miller Demarest lives acharmed life. She has a beautiful home, a dashing lawyer husband, and two delightful children. But beneath this idyllic surface, the pressure of being the “perfect flower”of an illustrious family—and a stable, always-available wife, mother, and daughter—are getting to her. The spark has gone out of her marriage, and to her own surprise, she’s having an affair. What follows is at once cathartic and provoking, and both may be necessary states in order for Polly to become the kind of person she wants to be.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

LAURIE COLWIN is the author of five novels, Happy All the Time, Family Happiness, Goodbye Without Leaving, A Big Storm Knocked It Over, and Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object; three collections of short stories, Passion and Affect, The Lone Pilgrim, and Another Marvelous Thing; and two collections of essays, Home Cooking and More Home Cooking. Colwin died in 1992.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

One

Polly Solo-Miller Demarest was the perfect flower of the Solo-Miller family. This family had everything: looks, brains, money, a strong, fortified sense of clan, and branches in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, as well as London, just like a banking house. The patriarch of the New York gang was Henry Solo-Miller, husband of the former Constanzia Hendricks, nicknamed Wendy. Both were of old, old Jewish families, the sort that are more identifiably old American than Jewish. Solo-Millers and Hendrickses had come from Holland via Spain before the American Revolution, which they had either taken part in or helped to raise money for. Henry and Wendy had three children: Paul, Dora (called Polly by everyone), and Henry, Jr.

Polly was sandwiched between difficult brothers. Paul, a lawyer like his father, had always been mute, preoccupied, and cranky. He was said to be brilliant, but he was so silent that no one had ever really heard him say a brilliant thing. He was forty-three, unmarried, as greatly respected in the legal community as his distinguished father, and a passionate music lover. Henry, Jr., on the other hand, was a lout. He had refused to pursue the normal Solo-Miller and Hendricks occupations—law and banking—and had instead pursued his boyhood adoration of all things aerodynamic and become an aeronautical engineer. He had married Andreya Fillo, a fellow engineer, the daughter of Czech refugees. She and Henry, Jr., behaved more like brother and sister than like a married couple. They wore each other’s clothes, did not plan to have children, played with their dog, and dedicated themselves to kite-flying. Henry, Jr.’s large, smelly tickhound, Kirby, was their child substitute and, like his master, he had resisted proper training.

It was Polly who had made grandparents of her parents. She was married to a big, handsome lawyer named Henry Demarest and had produced two nice, sturdy children: Pete, nine, and Dee-Dee, whose real name was Claire, seven and a half. These children were doted on by their grandparents, who never displayed to them the eccentricities they had displayed to their own children.

Henry, Sr., dwelt in what Polly called “the realm of the higher mind.” This meant that often he was not fully present. He was a rather silent man who was set in his ways the way Rembrandts are hung on a wall—with great care, correctness, and dignity—but he was funny about food and believed that everything, from vegetables to standing ribs of beef, should be washed with soap and water before cooking, and that all eggs were to be scrubbed before being boiled. For a prank, Polly, as a teenager, had once put a chicken into the washing machine.

As a result of these crotchets Henry, Sr., was lied to constantly. He ate happily anything that was put before him as long as someone first assured him that everything had been grown in certifiably organic soil and washed in soap and water. The pollution of the atmosphere was one of his most beloved subjects.

Wendy never got anything right. For years she had called poor Douglas Stern “Derwood,” and now everyone, including his own family, called him that. She did not actually refer to Pablo Picasso as Carlos—Polly claimed she did—but she came close. It was a family joke that Polly had married a lawyer named Henry in order not to give her mother anything to screw up.

In general, the Solo-Millers preferred the company of their fellow Solo-Millers to that of other mortals, and they gathered frequently. Every Sunday they appeared at Henry and Wendy’s at noon for a meal that some people would call lunch and others brunch. The Solo-Millers called it breakfast.

The household Polly had set up with Henry Demarest was very much like her parents’. This made perfect sense: Henry, who came from a Chicago family rather like the Solo-Millers, shared Polly’s feelings about comfort, order, and the way life should be lived. They believed in harmony, generosity, and good works. As a lawyer, Henry was very well respected. He sat on the board of Pete and Dee-Dee’s school; he was a Fellow of The American College of Trial Lawyers and a trustee of the school he had gone to as a boy in Chicago.

Polly had a job, too. She was Coordinator of Research in Reading Projects and Methods for the information arm of the Board of Education. That all children learn to read was Polly’s cause and it was her job to evaluate the stream of new methods, texts, and tests that poured in to the Board. This job combined some of the things Polly held most dear—service, children, and books—but for all that she was committed to it, she did not talk about it very often. Occasionally a truly crackpot reading manual would cross her desk and she would bring it home to show Henry, but otherwise she left her work at work. She felt that methods of teaching reading were chiefly of interest to other reading technicians, whereas the law was a large subject of general interest.

Polly was good at her job, good at games; and she was also a marvelous cook and housekeeper. She was neither oafish and slobby like her brother Henry, nor finicky and allergic to most common substances like her brother Paul. She had been a remarkably sweet-tempered child and as a girl had mediated any fights between Paul and Henry that had looked as if they might end up in fratricide. Those squabbles had been Paul and Henry, Jr.’s only close contact. Now they met only at family gatherings, although Polly saw both of them frequently.

She had graduated near the top of her class at a fine woman’s college (which was Wendy’s alma mater), had studied in France for a year, come home and worked as a reading teacher at a private school, married Henry Demarest, gotten a degree in reading education, taught in the public schools, produced Pete and Dee-Dee, and then found herself a high-level job. She was at her office three days a week, and at home on Mondays and Fridays. This, she felt, left her plenty of time for everything—to run the house, to spend time with Pete and Dee-Dee, and to be a helpmeet and sweetheart to her husband.

In addition, she was her mother’s favorite lunch companion and a great social asset. Polly was a good listener. She could bring the shy forward or placate the arrogant and hostile. Furthermore, she was always happy to provide something scrumptious for dessert. She had never given anyone the slightest pause. Her family doted on her, but no one felt it was necessary to pay much attention to someone as sturdy, upright, cheerful, and kind as she.

Sunday mornings always found Henry Demarest lolling in bed, and Polly in the kitchen making pancakes in the shape of spiders, bats, and snakes for her children. Polly loved Sunday mornings. She liked to have everyone at home, and she liked to look out her window and not see traffic on Park Avenue. She liked to watch families come trooping out from under their building marquees and walk off toward Central Park.

Every Sunday morning, more or less at nine-thirty, the telephone rang.

“Hello, darling. It’s your poor mother,” Wendy would say.

“Hi, Mum,” Polly always said. “How many for breakfast?” Because of complicated legal schedules, and because Henry, Jr., and Andreya were sometimes called away to work on special projects, the number of people at Sunday breakfast changed from week to week. “We’re all here this morning. Just a second. Pete, you may not use all that maple syrup. Sorry, Mum. Who’s coming?”

“Your brother Paul is not coming for breakfast,” Wendy said. “He was supposed to be, but he won’t be.”

“Why won’t he?”

“He sent us an express letter,”...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593313542
ISBN 13 
9780593313541
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
49078
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9781474615952: Family Happiness (W&N Essentials)

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  1474615953 ISBN 13:  9781474615952
Verlag: W&N, 2024
Softcover