Big as Life: Three Tales for Spring » (Reprint)

Maureen Howard's novels include Grace Abounding, Expensive Habits, and Natural History, which were nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her memoir, The Facts of Life, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The second volume in Maureen Howard's planned quartet of fictions based on the seasons reaffirms her reputation as one of America's most highly regarded authors. In the title piece, Howard presents an ambitious exploration of the life and work of John James Audubon, revealing how his dedication to his masterpiece, The Birds of America, devoured everyone around him, including his wife, Lucy. In "Children with Matches," a feminist historian discovers that the hard lessons of the past may be a route to responsibility in the present. "The Magdalene" is a tale of willful innocence and loss of faith about a woman who comes to New York in the 1930s to be the nanny of a wealthy family. Thoughtful, intricate, and insightful, Howard's stories are compelling achievements.

"A splendid new triptych of novellas." (John Leonard, The New York Times Book Review)

"Succeeds in gorgeously evoking the movement of lives and minds and emotion . . . This is a quiet, contemplative book of subtlety and grace, passion and commitment." (The Atlantic Monthly)

Publishers Weekly

With a sharpshooter's eye and brilliantly attuned sensibility, Howard considers the implications of the spring season in the second in a projected series of works (after A Lover's Almanac) inspired by the natural world. In tensile, beautifully articulated prose, she reveals the souls of people who reflect on renewal and redemption in three richly conveyed settings. In the "April" section, a young woman inherits the house where she lived for a while as a child with two eccentric maiden aunts and brooded in a secluded turret. Ruminating on her ancestors and the play of nature in their lives, the adult Marie Claude also muses on her own life and the future of a new relationship. A rich, elegiac tone pervades "May." Nell Boyle, an 18-year-old Irish beauty with secret shames and hidden sins, is sent to live with her wealthy cousins in America and becomes a wary observer of their dysfunctional family. Watching as her innocent young cousin Mae's burgeoning religious fervor is squelched by the reserved, upper-crust Boyles, Nell contrasts the adult Mae's conventional but heartbreakingly empty existence with her own unhappy past. In the tripartite "June" section, Howard examines the sacrifices required by passionate commitment. The extraordinary life of nature artist John James Audubon is seen through the eyes of his long-suffering wife, Lucy. "Salvino" revisits Artie and Louise, from A Lover's Almanac, again reflecting the interplay of nature against a background of academia in its most political incarnation. The final panel, "Myself," is a crisp quasi-memoir, revealing Howard's own "landscape of memory" of the flora and fauna that had a significant impact on her imagination. Howard's language is fresh and energetic, her metaphors luminous. Her narrative method filtered vignettes, shadowy implications, layers of complexities, delayed explanations results in challenging, adventurous literary fiction. Agent, Gloria Loomis. (May 21) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.