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Saying Grace Paperback – June 19, 2005
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Rue Shaw has everything--a much loved child, a solid marriage, and a job she loves. Saying Grace takes place in Rue's mid-life, when her daughter is leaving home, her parents are failing, her husband is restless and the school she has built is being buffeted by changes in society that affect us all. Funny, rich in detail and finally stunning, this novel presents a portrait of a tight-knit community in jeopardy, and of a charming woman whose most human failing is that she wants things to stay the same.
Saying Grace is about the fragility of human happiness and the strength of convictions, about keeping faith as a couple whether it keeps one safe or not. Beth Gutcheon has a gift for creating a world in microcosm and capturing the grace in the rhythms of everyday life.
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateJune 19, 2005
- Dimensions8.04 x 5.38 x 0.77 inches
- ISBN-109780060927271
- ISBN-13978-0060927271
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Review
“By turns heartwarming and heartbreaking.” — Boston Globe
“Ms. Gutcheon knows private schools, and she knows her craft-and that’s a winning combination.” — New York Times Book Review
“Deliciously readable” — San Francisco Chronicle
“Saying Grace is a smart, funny, sane novel ― the kind that I ransack bookstores to find.” — Adair Lara, author of At Adair’s House
About the Author
Beth Gutcheon is the critically acclaimed author of the novels, The New Girls, Still Missing, Domestic Pleasures, Saying Grace, Five Fortunes, More Than You Know, Leeway Cottage, and Good-bye and Amen. She is the writer of several film scripts, including the Academy-Award nominee The Children of Theatre Street. She lives in New York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Saying Grace
By Gutcheon, BethPerennial
Copyright © 2004 Beth R. GutcheonAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0060927275
Chapter One
It was two days before the opening of school when the Spanish teacher dropped dead. Dropped is the right word; she was on her knees in the garden, cleaning out the crocosmia bed, when she felt a sudden lightball of pain in her chest, and then was herself extinguished. She toppled face-forward into the fragrant California earth, and lay there, stiffening in the September sunshine, wearing her green-and-yellow gardening gloves. She was otherwise dressed for work. It was the faculty's first day back at The Country School, and the news of her death found her colleagues gathered in Packard gymnasium for a CPR course, performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on rubber women.
As her colleagues mourned and comforted each other, Rue Shaw left the gym to hurry across campus to her office. Under the circumstances, she was struck by the illusion the parched campus imparted of a serene and manageable universe. The fields where the bigger boys played football were freshly mowed and green from a summer of sprinklers. As she passed, Manuel was laying down lines in white lime so that all could see the structure of the game, the clear boundary between in and out, good and bad, safe and sorry. Everywhere the scent of cut grass mingled with the smell of eucalyptus.
The offices of the Head, and all the rest of the administration, were in a building known as Home, because it had been the original homestead when the campus was a ranch. The Plum family who pioneered it had grown prosperous and built a grand Victorian farmhouse with wide, covered porches and the latest in gingerbread trim, in which Rue now lived. From there the Plum family had raised livestock and apricots and used the old homestead for a sheep barn. Rue Shaw now bustled into Home through the dutch door, which Merilee kept open at the top to let in the sunlight and the perfume of the outside air and closed at the bottom to keep out the campus dogs and cats. Rue went straight past Merilee's desk to find her assistant head, Mike Dianda. His office, which had once been a birthing pen for lambs, was low and cluttered, with heavy dark beams and small windows. Mike's desk was stacked with papers and books; he had more than once misplaced his telephone and had had to wait for it to ring so he could find it.
In Mike's office, miscreant children sent to be sentenced sat in the ladderback wooden chair facing his desk. But the soft leather chair against the bookcase was only for Rue, for when she came in with mugs of tea at the end of the day and kicked the door closed behind her. Mike was to Rue like the brother she never had. He was tart, smart, handsome, and funny, and as far as she could tell, never afraid to tell her she was wrong. The collaboration was particularly successful because he did not want her job. He would make a fine school head when his life was more his own, but at the moment as a gay man and a single parent he had enough on his plate getting his daughters through school.
"I talked with the mother in Albuquerque," said Mike, as Rue appeared in his doorway.
"How is she?"
"They knew Mariel had a heart condition."
"Did they? Did we know it?"
"I didn't. Maybe Lynn Ketchum did, or Cynda Goldring. They were closest to her."
"Will they have the funeral here?"
"No, they're taking her back to New Mexico. We'll have to have a memorial."
"God. Yes. When?" They both looked at the calendar. Beginning of term was jammed with conferences, trustee meetings, parent council meetings.
Rue said, "I better call Fletcher Sincerbeaux. And Helen Lord, and . . . who else has Spanish in Primary?"
"Would Mrs. Ladabaum come back, do you think?" Mike asked.
"I don't know, isn't she in Florida?"
"Would we want her if she'd come? She was getting awfully deaf."
"Of course . . . I never saw a better teacher. We must have an ear trumpet somewhere."
"Okay, I'll find her," said Mike.
Rue went off to her office to start calling fellow school heads who might have a lead on a Spanish teacher.
On the wall in her office Rue kept a framed motto from Lucy Madeira, a famous East Coast educator. It read: "Function in disaster, finish in style." She often wondered what motto her predecessors, Carla and Lourdes Plum, would have willed her, had they been able to imagine her. The Plum family had proved over time to be as unfruitful as their land was lush, and their line narrowed and stopped with the spinster sisters, Carla and Lourdes, who had made a living conducting a day school according to tenets of their own devising.
Rue had made a study of the "archives" left by the Miss Plums. These artifacts were piled in wooden milk boxes and stored in the abandoned ice house, and included papers, letters, programs from Germans and Christmas plays, books, bottles of Coca-Cola syrup with which they treated children's coughs, woolen bathing suits, theatrical costumes, and some untouched ration books from World War II. The Miss Plums had gaily mixed notions of progressive education which they read about in papers sent out from New York, with their favorite parts of Science and Health, the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, and the teachings of Madame Blavatsky. They believed that babies were born with their souls and their life paths fully formed, so there was no point imposing structure from without that might serve to crowd or cloud the structure within. They believed that every child had an aura which could be read, and that after death, that aura remained on earth, not so much a ghost as an angel, so the clear California air was crowded for them with invisible beings, concerned with the ways of woman and intervening in all her doings.
If the Miss Plums were right in their interesting theories, then no doubt their own auras lingered on the campus of The Country School, interfering in the business of shaping young lives in the ways most likely to confirm their own beliefs. If their theories were in error no one would ever know, because the Depression had put an end to their experiment before a significant sample of scholars could be sent out into the world. Their school was closed, and the Miss Plums lived by selling off bits and pieces of outer pastures until only fifteen acres remained. By that time World War II had brought prosperity back to the region, and the Miss Plums lived to see others make large profits on land that had recently been theirs. Their joint Will and Testament left what land and money remained for the founding of a Country Day School, on acres that had once been lost in a wide expanse of range and orchard, but by the last decade of the twentieth century formed a hemmed-in green patch of nature, bonsaied between expensive developer houses and an upscale mall called The Countrye Mile. The campus was like a patch of the world as it once had been, but in a jar, with the top off.
Emily Dahl arrived in Seven Springs by accident, if there are accidents. She had driven north until the children got hungry, and pulled off the highway into the nearest town. Her blond hair was clammy from heat and dirt, and there were half-moon perspiration stains under her breasts on her once crisp lemon-yellow blouse. She kept thinking of things she had forgotten to pack. A favorite pair of gardening shoes she had left outside the back door. A book she was reading, left facedown on the clothes hamper beside the bathtub. The worst was David's gerbil. Fortunately, David had not yet noticed.
She found that Seven Springs was a town of some natural beauty. There were fruit trees, citrus, and apricot, and on the dry hills, avocado. She and Malone and David found a taco restaurant that was air-conditioned. Across the street was a movie house that must have been built in the thirties. It had dusty art deco lettering on the marquee and the front of the theater was faced with black marble. It was cracked now, with pieces missing, but the whole effect was evocative; she remembered the theater in the town on Long Island where she grew up, where the whole eighth grade would show up at the movies on Saturday night. If you liked somebody and he liked you, you would sit apart from the group, in the balcony. There would be frightened bumblings having to do with the boy getting his arm around you while pretending to stretch. You would then die of embarrassment as you waited another hour or so for him to get the nerve to let his arm, lying across the back of your seat, inch down to encircle your shoulders. This, Emily realized, was a memory from a simpler world.
Malone squinted across the street at the movie house while she ate. Eleven years old, she had just gotten her first pair of glasses. She looked like a cross between a beautiful bombshell and a baby owl.
"Mom, What About Bob just started."
"Did it? Can you read the times from all the way over here?"
Malone nodded. "You'd only miss a little bit of it and I can tell you what happened."
David said "Are we going to the movies?" David the space cadet noticed everything two beats after everyone else.
"I don't know," said Emily, wondering really, Why not? What else did they have to do that evening? "Sure, if you want to."Continues...
Excerpted from Saying Graceby Gutcheon, Beth Copyright © 2004 by Beth R. Gutcheon. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : 0060927275
- Publisher : William Morrow Paperbacks (June 19, 2005)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780060927271
- ISBN-13 : 978-0060927271
- Item Weight : 8.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 8.04 x 5.38 x 0.77 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,957,131 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #34,029 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #129,666 in American Literature (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
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Beth Gutcheon is the best-selling author of eleven novels. Her work has been translated into at least fifteen languages. Her novel More Than You Know was named one of the best books of the year by the LA Times, and most recently her first murder mystery, Death at Breakfast, was a finalist for the Nero award. Her novel Still Missing was made into the 20th Century Fox feature film Without a Trace for which she wrote the screenplay. She is also the author of the narration for Children of Theatre Street, a feature-length documentary that was nominated for an Academy Award. She lives in New York City. Visit www.bethgutcheon.com.
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I don't want to give away any of the plot, but I will say that the ending left me a little bit dissatisfied. Only some things resolved in the end, and it seemed abrupt. However, this did not spoil the book, and I would still highly recommend it.
For the majority of the story, we are reading about Rue as she runs a private school and all of the various people and problems that entails. The book is well written in a way that I imagine is difficult to pull off...we are introduced to a multitude of characters and yet we really 'know' them all, the storyline shifts frequently and yet stays interesting and easy to follow, and all of the various situations grab your attention and leave you flipping pages to find out what happens with so-and-so. It's almost like sitting down to a lunch full of great gossip.
Then, thankfully near the end of the book, everything turns around and you are reading a book about someone's life coming apart. This may be realistic, it certainly happens in real life. It just feels jarring here, as if you're reading two different books squashed together and neither one finished. Many threads from early on in the book disappear, and your gossipy lunch date ends without you finding out what happens at the end of those juicy stories. The new storyline is also rather unresolved...where Rue goes from there or if she is able to finally really cope with her loss is unclear. I still recommend this book, the ending certainly wasn't bad, but I thought it could have been better.
I think (totally conjecture here) that perhaps this book was written as sort of a metaphor for our society and the traits that may be our undoing. The last part of the book, then, shows a sort of downfall. If this is the case it's an interesting idea, but I still would rather have started and finished the same book.
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And then, more than halfway through the book, Gutcheon seems to decide she's writing a totally different novel. Angelic daughter Georgia comes back from Juilliard to announce that she's dropping out of her vocal studies programme to join a rock duo with a rock composer (who's also dropping out of his conducting course at Juilliard). Brain-surgeon Henry comes close to breakdown, particularly as Rue deals with it in a 'there there dear, do what you like' sort of way. Suddenly the cosy world's turned into the sniping, poisonous one of beloved of soap operas. And then a terrible tragedy happens. And the school goes into meltdown. And Henry has an awful revelation to make. And right at the end there's another tragedy, which happens to two very minor characters.
This plot synopsis should reveal what is wrong with this novel - it's very badly constructed, and keeps changing direction in the oddest ways. Moreover, Gutcheon's decision to start with a slow-burning first half, all deceptively nice and domestic, and then provide a second half where in each chapter someone's either dying, getting fired or having a marital breakdown, means that the book starts to feel ridiculous. There's just not enough time for all the crises and changes of heart in the second part of the book, and Gutcheon's set up so many stories in the first half (and adds to them in the second half) that she can't possibly bring them to any sort of real resolution. There's also no time to really create distinctive characters, and apart from Henry, the brain-surgeon (who really is interesting) everyone feels very superficial: Rue is sweet and lovely, Georgia is wild and lovely, Emily is sweet and helpless, Chandler and his cronies and the ridiculously named new headmaster Chip are villainous, most of the children are petulant or delicate victims, Catherine is eccentric etc etc.
In addition, the novel seems very, very improbable. Emily, who'd had 20 years out of teaching, would hardly be able to turn up at a school saying 'oh, I'm an unhappy wife who hasn't worked for ages' and get a job on the spot - and another when she got sacked from the first job. Any reliable and caring headmistress would have surely made sure Catherine got grief counselling? Henry and Rue surely couldn't have made enough money to retire at the age of 52? A young girl training to be an opera singer would be very, very unlikely to make a sudden transition to rock music (which requires a different sort of voice) or indeed want to - and a girl as bright as Georgia would surely want to get her Juilliard qualification, ditto her strange boyfriend, who'd paid his own way right up to postgraduate level. The child Lyndie was so obviously being hurt by someone that the reluctance of most of the governing body to believe that there was anything wrong seemed ridiculous. Emily's abusive husband appeared to vanish remarkably quickly, bearing in mind his first threatening appearances, and to agree to his divorce very calmly. I'm sure a headmistress couldn't sack a teacher purely because said teacher had refused to have a meeting with a parent two days in a row during her lunch break without eating. And by the end of the novel, the story went off on all sorts of bizarre tangents. Henry and Rue endure a terrible tragedy, but then appear to have a blissful holiday immediately afterwards which almost reads like the Panther Canyon sections of Willa Cather's 'The Song of the Lark' (and which was beautifully written about, but appeared to have wandered in from another book). The new headmaster's decision to sack everyone resembled one of those computer games where you take out targets, and happened way too fast. I couldn't believe that the supposedly gentle and near-saintly Emily would have betrayed Rue as she is supposed to have done (if she did, Gutcheon's very hazy about it). And though the final scene was rather beautiful, it rather came out of nowhere and the book ended very inconclusively.
There are passages of lovely writing here and there, and the odd section (Rue and Henry's discussions about faith, Georgia's appearance at the Christmas service, the riding holiday, the final scene) which are truly beautiful. But this isn't a book that hangs together at all as a narrative, and Gutcheon's editor should have advised her to reshape it.