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Why She Went Home: A Novel - Hardcover

Rosenfeld, Lucinda

 
9781400061853: Why She Went Home: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1400061857 ISBN 13: 9781400061853
Verlag: Random House Inc, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

In a sequel to What She Saw. . . , appearance-conscious heroine Phoebe Fine faces more mature challenges including her mother's illness, a hostile and competitive older sister, and a moral and financial crisis involving a priceless viola. 30,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

<b>LUCINDA ROSENFELD</b> was born in New York City and grew up in New Jersey. Besides <b>What She Saw...</b> (the first installment of the Phoebe Fine chronicles), Rosenfeld’s fiction and essays have appeared in <i>The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine</i>, <i>Creative Nonfiction</i>, the<b> </b><i>Sunday Telegraph</i>, and many women’s magazines. She lives in Brooklyn, and has no pets.

Aus dem Klappentext

You have to love her, even when you’re laughing at her―Phoebe Fine, that is, the star of this hilariously eccentric and affecting new novel.<br><br>On the cusp of thirty, Phoebe has fled the high life and, ultimately, the no life of trying and failing to “be somebody” in Manhattan. She returns to her parents’ Depression-era bungalow across the river in New Jersey, the house she grew up in, to lie low with the crabgrass and dust bunnies and memories of her childhood, and perhaps just be herself. Easier said than done. Once resettled, Phoebe hatches a plan to resell her neighbors’ garbage on eBay, begins work on a solo album for electric violin and voice called Bored and Lonely, and accepts a date with the conductor of the Newark Symphony Orchestra, Roget Mankuvsky, a man with acid-washed jeans and a mysterious past. And so, with the hope of progress on both fronts, Phoebe’s search for a good way to make a living and a good man to make a life with continues.<br><br>In this second installment of Phoebe Fine’s life story, author Lucinda Rosenfeld raises the emotional and romantic stakes. Though still consumed with appearances, including her own, Phoebe now has serious grown-up issues to deal with―her mother’s illness, a hostile and competitive older sister with marital problems, and a moral and financial crisis involving a viola that may be worth millions of dollars. But the comic notes prevail. The question is, will Phoebe?

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1

At sixty-five, despite waning lung power, Leonard Milton Fine was still lead oboist of the Newark Symphony Orchestra. He was also one of few musicians in the troupe whom Newark’s car thieves hadn’t scared off from driving to work; he figured his 1986 Yugo hatchback wasn’t tempting even for spare parts. On the evening of the NSO’s season opener, he set off down the New Jersey Turnpike with a full car. Next to him in the front, a lugubrious cellist wearing loafers that looked like bedroom slippers stared blankly at the toxic plumage of two dozen industrial smokestacks, which was bleeding into a violet and gold sunset. In the back, Leonard’s younger daughter, Phoebe, barely visible beneath a battered cello case covered with stickers from obscure music festivals, attempted to make conversation with the cellist’s flute-playing wife, a dark-browed blonde who seemed to have memorized the seating chart of every musical ensemble in the tristate area. Phoebe’s left ear was pinned against the neck of the case. As uncomfortable as she was, she considered herself lucky not to be sitting up front, in the death seat. Her father had the alarming habit of turning around while driving to talk to the passengers behind him. Earlier in the trip, while availing them of his many superlative buys on raingear at Burlington Coat Factory, he had narrowly avoided scaling the turnpike divide and then swerved into the middle lane, where he nearly got swiped by an eighteen-wheeler.

“Jesus, Dad!” Phoebe had cried, even though they were both secular Jews.

“Sorry there, folks.” Leonard had sounded incongruously cheerful after veering out of danger.

“Trying to give us a scare there, Lenny?” the flutist had asked. “Anyway, as I was saying, apparently Trudie Fisher is now playing third chair at the Pops, if you can believe it. I really can’t. The woman is always out of tune.”

“It’s amazing there’s any air left to breathe in this state,” the cellist had muttered to himself.

Leonard’s driving didn’t improve much after they got off the highway and made their way through downtown Newark. After almost shearing the door off a parked police car, he just missed mowing down a group of teenage boys playing stickball in the street. Eventually, to everyone’s relief, they arrived at the auditorium. Leonard found a parking place just around the corner, in front of a boarded-up crack house, and the four of them dispersed—the musicians through the stage door and Phoebe through the main entrance into the lobby. There, she spent the fifty minutes until showtime skimming a work of “women’s fiction” from the 1970s she’d grabbed off her parents’ bookshelf before leaving—to her surprise and chagrin, she was unable to locate a single sex scene—and perusing the arriving crowd, who were mainly old and feeble and white-haired (if they had any hair at all) and were yelling “Whaaat?” at each other as they futilely adjusted their hearing aids. There weren’t too many of them, either.

Indeed, as she settled herself into the first row of the mostly empty balcony, Phoebe was distressed to discover that, with the orchestra and the full chorus, there were twice as many people onstage as there were in the audience. Even more depressingly, a high percentage of those in attendance were probably nonpaying friends and relations of the musicians, such as herself. She hadn’t always empathized with her father’s setbacks. During her college years a decade earlier at Hoover University, when she saw the world primarily through the lens of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation (mostly her own, but still), she had even reveled in the NSO’s consistently paltry turnout, since the orchestra bore the name of a predominantly Hispanic, Arab, and African-American city, despite being an almost exclusively Asian and Caucasian organization. Never mind the fact that the music they played had all been composed by dead European males. Or that the structure of the orchestra was, by design, inegalitarian. Or that the house auditorium was, in fact, a converted mosque.

More recently, however, Phoebe had decided to try and bolster her father in the twilight of his musical career—a career that was already, by nature of the kind of music he played, obscure. In addition to having trouble blowing into his oboe, Leonard was finding it difficult keeping time and, by association, track of where he was in the score. While he’d never been a virtuoso—never been that good—it physically pained Phoebe to imagine her father lost in a sea of notes. She found his incompetence a little pathetic, just as she had always found everything about her father simultaneously endearing and exasperating. At the same time, after a lifetime spent dreading his classical music concerts, she had begun to look forward to them, if only for the opportunity they provided to sit in a chair doing absolutely nothing for two hours and not feel guilty about it. (Domestic plane travel, she’d found, offered similar comforts.)

One glance at the evening’s program changed her feelings on the subject. First up was Gustav Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony in D minor. If Phoebe remembered correctly from her teenage days playing second violin for the All County Orchestra, it was a bombastic monstrosity. Back then, of course, classical music had only been a burden, a built-in inadequacy, a zombie motion she went through to please her parents. It had never entirely lost that quality, though it had gained others as well. In Brahms, she had come to hear the tragedy of it all; in Chopin, the excruciating tremolo of lust in the spring. But there was something so inescapably pompous and irritating about the whole penguin-suited business. It was only in the dark, or when she closed her eyes, that she could even hear the music—the mystery and beauty that had outlived its own century.

Still, she was curious to lay eyes on the NSO’s new conductor, a certain Roget Mankuvsky. According to the program notes, he was not only the youngest conductor ever to perform with the NSO, he had studied with the great Uli Rindfleisch in Vienna, followed by the lesser-known Heinz Zimmerfenster in Berlin. Barely two years later, Mankuvsky became the assistant conductor of a small early instruments consortium in Lausanne, Switzerland. Then, at just thirty, he had been appointed the musical director of the Cherry Hill Community Orchestra. To Phoebe, who at twenty-nine had not yet decided whether she was a breakfast person or a lunch person, Mankuvsky seemed like a prodigy. (The verdict: neither and, at the same time, both.)


At two minutes past eight, a flock of late-arriving concert-goers having failed to materialize, the NSO’s slinky Japanese-American concertmistress, Nanette Yamaguchi, appeared onstage in a wraparound dress that gave full play to her protruding clavicles. The way she swung her hair around while bowing the tuning A showed that she lorded her power over the other orchestra members. That could have been me, Phoebe thought to herself, while also realizing how glad she was that it wasn’t. Mankuvsky came out shortly afterward. He was short, dark, stocky, and not particularly handsome, with bulging eyeballs and a mashed-in nose. He bounded onto the podium in brown shoes, his ruffled shirt only half tucked into his concert tails, his spiky hair sticking out of his head. From the back, he looked like a sea anemone.

His conducting style, as it soon emerged, had more in common with the bat-trapped-in-the-attic type of flailing made famous by Leonard Bernstein than it did with, say, Fritz Reiner, the old conductor of the...

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Verlag
Random House Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1400061857
ISBN 13 
9781400061853
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
303
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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