Plain Grief - Hardcover

Chernoff, Maxine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671724630 ISBN 13: 9780671724634

Publisher: Summit Books, 1991

When Sarah Holmes announces she wants a divorce, her daughter and a girlfriend run away from home, Sarah and her lover fly to California to find them, and as they wait for the girls, along with Sarah's sister, all of them must come to terms with the changes in their lives

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Another end-of-a-marriage story: poet Chernoff's first novel circles familiar themes of disintegration and loss without ever fully engaging them. Sarah and Larry Holm are both university teachers in Chicago. Sarah has uncomplainingly endured Larry's affairs with graduate students for so long that she is numb to them; she has concentrated on her classes and on raising Scotty and Carrie, now teenagers. What drives her to attend grief-therapy sessions is not the state of her 16-year-old marriage but the death (heart attack) of her father Stanley, which has depressed her so much she hates to leave the house. Relief is at hand in the form of another therapy patient, Jeremy Bone Shoulder, an Indian social scientist who is ``mourning the fate of his people.'' Soon Sarah has joyously taken her first lover, but this new threat to domestic peace proves too much for 14-year-old Carrie, who just says no to Thanksgiving turkey and hops a Greyhound with visiting cousin Deenie from Santa Monica. Anorexic Deenie (who hatched the scheme) is far more troubled than Carrie, reflecting the California wackiness of her own m‚nage. Chernoff begins her story with the aborted holiday dinner, then crosscuts between the teenagers on the road and their frazzled elders' attempts to recover them, with a climax at the L.A. bus terminal. It's a taut enough structure, but Chernoff consistently subverts it with flashbacks and a swarm of minor characters. Just as damaging is her failure to characterize energetically: Larry is little more than a rampaging libido; Sarah and Jeremy are well-meaning but fuzzy. None of this gives the reader much reason to care about the death of a marriage that had harbored, according to Larry, ``something wrong from the start that he could never name.'' A disappointing debut. -- Copyright �1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal:

Though ostensibly about a woman's loss of her father, Plain Grief deals with the myriad losses of life. Unable to cope after her father's death, Sarah Holms begins attending a grief therapy group, and, finally, is able to acknowledge her husband's infidelities and loose herself from her long-dead marriage. Her husband Larry has long since lost too much of himself in marriage and family. Her daughter Carrie flees from the family as it falls apart. And her niece Deenie, an anorexic, fades out of her parents' lives both figuratively and literally. But with loss comes endurance, love, and renewal: real life. Chernoff's poetically crafted novel owes much to her beginnings--she is the author of five volumes of verse. Interweaving a variety of characters' perspectives and time frames, her novel should appeal to readers of Gail Godwin and Mary Gordon. Highly recommended for most fiction collections.
- Francine Fialkoff, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.