All New People - Softcover

Lamott, Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1582430543 ISBN 13: 9781582430546

Publisher: Counterpoint, 1999

Synopsis

Newly divorced, Nan Goodman returns to her childhood home and to vivid thoughts of her eccentric yet warm familyher unconventional parents, supportive babysitter, and loving younger brotherand of the feelings of security and warmth of a bygone era. Reprint.

About this title

About the Author:

Anne Lamott is the author of four other novels: Hard Laughter, Rosie, Joe Jones, and the recent Crooked Little Heart. Her non-fiction includes Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, and the best-selling Traveling Mercies. She lives in Northern California with her son, Sam.

From Publishers Weekly:

Confirming the talent evinced in Rosie (and somewhat obscured by the excessively arch tone of her last novel, Joe Jones ), Lamott here achieves her promising potential in a novel of rare sensitivity and evocative power. The rueful, elegiac tone of her prose balanced by humor and plangent insights, she tells a quiet but resonant story through the eyes of Nan Goodman, who has returned to the small northern California town of her childhood. This is a meticulously observed memoir of growing up as the child of ultra - liberal (former "commie") parents: her volatile father is a noted but not financially successful writer; her mother, a devout Christian who rails at God and seeks to reform the world through social activism. The extended family includes Nan's brother Casey, their feckless, alcoholic uncle Ed and obese aunt Peg, and Nan's mother's eccentric divorced friend, Natalie. There is little overt action here--Natalie gets pregnant by Ed, Casey smokes pot, their father leaves and comes back--but these events are magnified against the social and cultural currents of the '60s and '70s: developers change the character of the town, there is an epidemic of divorces, the drug culture takes its toll. The rural setting is integral to Nan's memories: the smell and sight of the sea, wildflowers on the brown hillsides, plum and apple and fig trees, pink and purple fog. Nan remembers it all with a clear-eyed nostalgia, acknowledging the migraines that made her an outsider, and the fear, shame and humiliation lurking even in the fondest memories of happy times. The emotional complexity of this understated tale makes it an absorbing read.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1582430543
• ISBN 13: 9781582430546
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176