Shelter - Hardcover

Gibson, Wesley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0517585820 ISBN 13: 9780517585825

Publisher: Harmony Books, 1992

Six members of the Demerest family endure the pressures that make up a family--adolescence, pain, marital discord, the tensions of work--over a period of ten years

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From Kirkus Reviews:

A coy first novel featuring a blue-collar Virginia family whose house is slowly sinking--along with their collective outlook on life. Gibson's debut lacks the zip of some of its thematic predecessors (Geek Love, The Beans of Egypt, Maine) but finally engages the reader through sheer tenacity. From the day Joan realizes that her house in Virginia is gradually plunging into the earth, nothing seems to go right for the Demerest family. Already, Melissa, the eldest of Joan's four children, is in the throes of adolescent rebellion--experimenting with sex, drugs, and fast-moving cars. Then four-year-old Kevin pushes second-oldest Daryl down the stairs, while nine-year-old Brenda, a budding Young Republican, writes fashion advice for the school newspaper and schemes to become the next Nancy Reagan. Meanwhile, husband Kyle, who fills cigarette machines for a living, is no help to Joan as he shacks up with an unemployed blond; and though Joan continues to struggle against the forces that are eroding her family's life, the momentum of the Demerests' destiny proves too strong to combat. Soon the house sinks to its second- story windows, giant bugs invade the lawn, antisocial Kevin's strange genius for painting fades away at the onset of adolescence, and Melissa announces that she's a lesbian. When Daryl's skin turns green, causing him to quit school and join a traveling freak-show with Kyle's accommodating lover (leaving Kyle to wander the streets as a homeless, unemployed drunk), Joan begins to understand how impossible life is to control--and how only in letting go can any joy be found. Often depressing when it means to amuse; still, a brave and intriguing debut. -- Copyright �1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

In a series of interlocking vignettes, first novelist Gibson traces the process of being a family's decline. We first meet the Demerests when they move into a new house in a nameless community. Joan copes with the four children, and Kyle, a vendor who services cigarette machines, wonders whether he is happy. The family goes through seemingly normal transformations over the next decade, with a few surrealistic touches. Rebellious Melissa discovers she's a lesbian; Daryl has a brief high school basketball career until his skin turns green; perfectionist Brenda becomes a miniature Nancy Reagan, scheming to be the consummate conservative political wife, and the baby, Kevin, experiences a spurt of artistic genius. As Kyle and Joan divorce, the breakdown of the Demerests decay of the family is reflected in the slow, mysterious sinking of their house, which eventually forces the family to enter through the second-floor windows. With bleak insight, Gibson effectively portrays the complexities of family ties and seems most conscious of the agony and deliberate cruelty that family members kin can visit on one another. The Demerests find little joy among themselves and little pleasure in life. The novel stays faithful to time's plodding nature, and Gibson's detached tone conveys a painful hopelessness, at times overwhelmingly. But the uneasy blend of realism and fantasy jars the reader and ultimately undermines his message.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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