The Almanac Branch: A Novel - Hardcover

Morrow, Bradford

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671739328 ISBN 13: 9780671739324

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1991

Synopsis

Grace Brush struggles to find her own identity as she grows up in a family of headstrong, eccentric, and powerful men who harbor a thirty-year-old secret that could ruin them all

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

This hybrid tale of Freudian psychodrama and gothic affects is narrated by Grace Brush, a 33-year-old woman traumatized by a childhood marked by migraines and incest. At the age of seven, Grace's visions of Flare Man (he does tricks and irradiates a winter ailanthus tree into fiery leaves) prompt the family's removal from a Manhattan brownstone to Scrub Farm on Shelter Island. There Grace's hallucinations cease, but she is troubled instead by the elaborate fantasies of her brother Desmond, four years her senior, with whom she engages in sexual unions secretly witnessed by another brother, Berg. Meanwhile, the distracted father, who lords over a sprawling consumer-products business, and the anxious, depressed mother drift away from each other and from the children, leaving Grace to puzzle out the truth of their lives in her almanac, the calendar in which this tale is written. As with the children of most emotionally dysfunctional families, Grace is ill-equipped for such an undertaking: bereft of understanding, she clings to dead cliches ("Things are never so bad as they seem to be in the night"); her impatient logic veers from intuitive to nonsensical. In the end, Grace remains deeply enigmatic--by turns poetic and pathetic, inert and charging--attempting, as always, to grasp something only she can see. The author's language, despite the occasional false note, hews closely to Grace's troubled mind. Morrow ( Come Sunday ) is the editor of the literary magazine Conjunctions.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

The interplay between truth and fancy is the focus of Morrow's intriguing, multilayered psychological study. Grace Brush suffers from megrims in both senses of the word--the acute physical pain of the migraine and the psychic pain of random, furtive, unbidden thoughts and feelings that impose themselves upon her. In her migrainous state, the realities of her life take on new dimensions. Thus, an episode of childhood sexual experimentation with a younger brother takes on, after his death, the characteristics of incestuous ravishment. This memory, in turn, influences her response to both husband and lover. It is only one of many branches in this complex tale of a family's struggle to find redemption. Grace may be the most obvious victim, but others suffer too--from the wheeler-dealer father who loves but avoids his children to the older brother whose own fantasies about his sister take concrete form in a pornographic movie. This second novel (following Come Sunday, LJ 4/1/88) is an accomplished work worthy of addition to most collections of serious fiction.
- David Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Peters burg, Fla.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0671739328
• ISBN 13: 9780671739324
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 286