Genealogy: A Novel - Softcover

Casey, Maud

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060740892 ISBN 13: 9780060740894

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2006

Synopsis

Meet the Hennarts: Samantha Hennart, a poet with writer's block; her husband, Bernard, obsessed with the life of a nineteenth-century Belgian mystic with stigmata; their son, Ryan, a mediocre rock musician; and their eighteen-year-old daughter, Marguerite, who is quietly losing her mind. A meditation on family, faith, and mental illness, Genealogy is an operatic story of one family's unraveling and ultimate redemption.

About this title

About the Author:

Maud Casey stories have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. Casey received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her M.F.A. in fiction from the University of Arizona. She lives in Washington, DC and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland.

From Booklist:

The long-married mother of two, Samantha Hennart is obsessed with quoting from the sixth-century Rule of St. Benedict, while her ne'er-do-well English professor husband, Bernard, is obsessed with nineteenth--century Belgian stigmatic Louise Lateau. This all makes for rather moribund conversations around the dinner table on mandatory family dinner night, which is just one of the reasons their son, 25-year-old rock musician Ryan, takes off for California. The other reasons all involve his complicated relationship with his unstable 18-year-old sister, Marguerite, whom he has virtually raised, and who takes off after him only to land in a mental hospital. The hospital scenes are among the novel's best, as Marguerite, in the grip of hallucinations, spews illogical dialogue that makes a crazy kind of sense. Casey injects her family domestic drama with a deeply philosophical base and sonorous meditations on the notion of attaining ecstasy in everyday life, but the novel only really gets cooking midway through. Samantha and Bernard's circular conversations about their dying marriage grow tedious; it's the kids who make Casey's prose sing. Joanne Wilkinson
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About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0060740892
• ISBN 13: 9780060740894
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 260