Sweetwater: A Novel - Softcover

Robinson, Roxana

 
9780812967340: Sweetwater: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812967348 ISBN 13: 9780812967340
Verlag: Random House Inc, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Remarrying several years after the death of her first husband, young widow Isabel Green finds her new marriage a difficult one, and she is forced to struggle to make it succeed, while confronting a second challenge, her job as an environmental advocate and her growing commitment to that goal. Reader's Guide included. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Roxana Robinson is the author of two previous novels, a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe and two short-story collections. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony. Robinson’s fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s and Vogue. She lives in New York City and Westchester County, New York.


From the Hardcover edition.

Aus dem Klappentext

In this brilliant, luminous novel, one of our finest realist writers gives us a story of surpassing depth and emotional power. Acclaimed for her lucid and compassionate exploration of the American family, Roxana Robinson sets her new work on familiar terrain New York City and the Adirondacks but with Sweetwater she transcends the particulars of the domestic sphere with a broader, more encompassing vision. In this poignant account of a young widow and her second marriage, Robinson expands her scope to include the larger natural world as well as the smaller, more intimate one of the home.

Isabel Green s marriage to Paul Simmons, after the death of her first husband, marks her reconnection to life a venture she s determined will succeed. But this proves to be harder than she d anticipated, and the challenges of starting afresh seem more complicated in adulthood. Staying at the Simmons lodge for their annual summer visit, Isabel finds herself entering into a set of familial complexities. She struggles to understand her new husband, his elderly, difficult parents and his brother, whose relationship with Paul seems oddly fraught. Furthermore, her second marriage begins to cast into sharp relief the troubling echoes of her first. Isabel s professional life plays a part as well: a passionate environmental advocate, she is aware of the tensions within the mountain landscape itself during a summer of spectacular beauty and ominous drought.

In her cool, elegant prose, Robinson gracefully delivers a plot that is complex, surprising and ultimately wrenching in its impact. As the strands of family are woven tightly and inevitably together, and as the past painfully informs the present, the vivid backdrop of the physical world provides its own eloquent dynamic. Sweetwater is a stunning achievement by a writer at the peak of her craft.


From the Hardcover edition.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

The cabin was cool and dark, smelling of wood. Isabel set down her duffel bag inside the front door. Without looking at the unknown rooms on either side, she went straight down the dim hall to the door at the far end, a bright oblong of light. She pushed open the screen and stood looking out over the porch to the lake beyond.

It was late afternoon. The broad lake was still full of light, but across it, on the western shore, was a rising mass of shadow. The water was quiet, the reflections perfectly still: there, in silvery echoes, were the low wooded hills that ringed the lake, with the pure indigo sky above it.

Isabel heard her husband behind her, his footsteps hollow on the bare floorboards. When he reached her, she spoke without turning.

“This is beautiful.” It was her first visit here; she had only been married to Paul since February, seven months.

“We like it,” Paul said. He had come here every summer of his life, fifty-one years. He stood just behind Isabel, setting his hands on her shoulders. He was tall but light-boned, rangy and lean, without bulk. His hands on her were nearly weightless.

“We’re letting the flies out,” he said, and Isabel stepped obediently onto the porch, his hands awkwardly still on her.

The outer walls of Acorn Cabin were unpainted shingle, faded to silver gray from decades of Adirondack weather. Beyond the porch’s rustic railing—peeled gnarly cedar—the ground sloped down mildly toward the water.

“Let’s go to the lake,” Isabel said. They had spent the day in the car, driving up from New York, and what she wanted now was air and light, open water. Exploration of the dark rooms of the cabin could wait.

Paul led the way down a narrow path through underbrush and young saplings. The air was dry and ferny and sweet. Through the trees the sight of water flickered intermittently, pale and calm. It was lost between branches, glimpsed again, glittering and wider, and then finally, as they turned a corner and arrived at the shore, the lake spread out before them, shimmering and complete. Down here at its edge the lake looked vast, its still-radiant surface immense and untouched. Around them was silence: the faint sibilance of air moving in the treetops, nothing more. It smelled of summer: trees, lake water, heat.

“This is heaven,” Isabel said. Her voice, in the great openness around her, was small.

Paul put his arm around her. “Exactly,” he said with satisfaction. “Now will you never leave me?”

This combination—warmth and absurdity—made Isabel laugh. She felt a surge of affection, then a flare of hope. Maybe this will work.

Hope was what Isabel was bringing to this marriage. It was nearly all she had: grief itself was a kind of death, it seemed. Two years of it had scoured her bare of other feelings. The time seemed past in which joy would rise easily to the surface of her heart and fill it. Grief had established itself at the center of her life, and though it no longer stormed through her, drenching and overwhelming, as it had at first, it was not gone. She still felt the grayness of her first husband’s absence from the world, the silence everywhere without his voice. The pain at being unable to tell him things: that she missed him. That she longed for him. That she still loved him. That she hated him for being gone.

It had not seemed that grief would ever leave, but after two years it had diminished, and she had determined, herself, to move on, to leave that gray landscape. What she felt for Paul was quieter than what she’d felt for Michael, but everything in her life seemed quieter. This kind of emotion—calm and muted—was what was left to her. She was forty-seven. All the other things—wildness and bliss and desperation, rage, the urgency of sex—lay behind her. She no longer expected them. What she aimed for now was loyalty and affection. Much of marriage was partnership; she didn’t want to be old alone. When she was old she wanted someone with her whom she trusted, someone she knew. What she felt for Paul was a powerful tenderness, and she knew this would increase. Affection deepens over time and hardship; compassion strengthens with the years. What Isabel wanted was something quiet, durable, domestic. A backwater, somewhere safe. She was done with storms.

She leaned against Paul. She was still trying to learn his body, still teaching her own to expect it. There were moments when it still felt strange: too tall, too angular, for comfort. She tilted her head back against Paul’s chest and looked straight up, at the great arch of sky.

“It’s so clear,” she said.

“Too clear, actually,” Paul answered. “We’re hoping for rain. There’s a serious drought. It’s hardly rained in months.”

Isabel looked again, scanning the deep blue for a wisp of cloud, a skein of high mist, but there was nothing. The reaches overhead were empty. She liked Paul’s knowing about the weather here, even when he was away.

“Did you come up here for the whole summer?” she asked. “When you were little?”

“Always a month, sometimes six weeks,” Paul answered. “My mother would come up with me and Whit. My father came up for long weekends and the last couple of weeks in August. My grandparents were here for the whole summer. We stayed in Acorn, they stayed in the lodge.”

Sweetwater Lodge was the original house, built by Paul’s maternal great-grandparents in the 1890s. The three cabins—Acorn, Oyster and Whistle—had been built during the twenties for grown children. Over a century later, the whole place—the houses and several hundred acres of land—was owned by a complicated family trust. Paul’s mother and her two brothers each spent a summer month at the lodge, their children in the cottages. Just now Paul’s parents, Douglas and Charlotte, were in the lodge; Paul and Isabel were to have Acorn for two weeks.

“Do you and Whitney share the cottage?” Isabel asked.

“No, it’s mine unless he gets married. The rule is, you don’t get a cabin until you’re married. Until then you stay at the lodge.”

Isabel had never met Paul’s brother, Whitney. He lived in Wyoming, where he did something in the national parks. He hadn’t been able to come to their wedding; a blizzard had closed the Laramie airport for three days. He was forty-five, unmarried. Isabel had wondered if he was gay, but it was a question she wasn’t ready to ask: there was a faint chill in Paul’s voice when he spoke of Whitney.

“And will Whit get married, do you think?” Isabel risked.

“Doubtful,” Paul said, cool.

Probably gay, then, she thought. Maybe that was why Paul was so disapproving. “Does he come here often?”

“Not anymore,” Paul said. “I guess the Adirondacks are small potatoes compared to the Bighorns.”

“And Geordie?”

Geordie was Paul’s son from his first marriage, his only child. Geordie was twenty-eight and lived in Vancouver, where he was a producer for the local television station. Isabel had met him only once, at their wedding.

Geordie was tall and lanky, like Paul, with a long face nearly identical to his father’s: the same high cheekbones, the same ascetic hollows in the lean cheeks, the same wide, mobile mouth. Isabel had been so happy to meet him. He’d seemed so like another, earlier version of his father that she felt as though she’d been magically permitted to meet Paul as a young man....

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Verlag
Random House Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812967348
ISBN 13 
9780812967340
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
330
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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