Object Lessons

15. 06 2008 | 18.05

Object Lessons

Author: Quindlen, Anna

Published in: 1991

Reprinted by: Ballantine Books (1992)

Number of pages:323

Main characters:

Maggie, Connie, Tommy,...

Plot:

Story of an Irish-Italian family living in the 1960's in suburban New York, where a new development is being built. The three main characters are all affected by it – Connie (mother) finds her old friend there, Tommy (father) discovers that his father's company is quite in troubles and Maggie (daughter) looses her best-friend because of disputes connected with their attempts to stop building of the new houses. Moreover the head of the family – Grandfather Jack Scanlan unexpectedly dies and one of Tommy's nieces becomes pregnant and gets married. All these and many other events finally make all of the main characters change and become more mature.

Comments:

The book does contain lots of events and stories connected with the characters and so it is difficult to distinguish really the "point", because the book sometimes becomes quite messy. Although the characters mentally develop and mature, it often seems to me, that their behaviour is not very let's say explainable. The level of English is OK and there are some good ideas, however as such the book didn'd impress me.

Extract:

It wasn't only the dead that lived with you that way. When she closed her eyes she could hear Helen say "Not to decide is to decide," and her mother saying, with a great throb in her quiet voice, "Not good or bad. Things just are." She knew that twenty years from now she would still hear all those voices in her head, and she knew that as long as they stayed there she would be able to do all the things she had to do, to make all the choices she had to make. But yesterday, as she had walked down the aisle, looking into the curled heart of the pink rose at the center of her bouquet, she had heard another voice, telling her to lift her chin, to keep her shoulders square, to walk slowly. And suddenly it had come to her, as she was dancing with her father, the stars of darkness exploding inside her closed lids, that the voice she was hearing was her own, for the first time in her life.