The lives of brothers Charlie and Owen Bender are changed forever on the night their father walks into the Vermont woods with a death wish and a shotgun. The second shock comes when his suicide note bequeaths the family's restaurant to Charlie alone, while leaving Owen with instructions to follow his own path, wherever it may take him.
Years later, the restaurant is a success. The void in Charlie's life, created by his beloved brother's absence, is finally filled when a passionate affair becomes a deeply satisfying marriage. And now prodigal son Owen is returning home, to be welcomed back into the family fold. But the cruel legacy that tore a brotherhood apart created wounds not easily healed . . . and there must be reckoning.
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Thomas Christopher Greene was born and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts. Educated at Hobart College and the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College, he is the author of Mirror Lake and I'll Never Be Long Gone. He currently lives outside Montpelier, Vermont, with his wife, Tia, their infant daughter, and their three dogs.
It's a great recipe: two cups of Cain and Abel, a pound of prodigal son, half a stick of East of Eden and a pinch of All My Sons. But sometimes no matter how good the ingredients, the soup's too thin. The problem is Greene's unwillingness to invest these characters with any psychological depth. Some novels make you think of the movie that could be made; this story makes you think of the novel that could be written. We're told that Charlie and Owen "were raised like twins, inseparable, with a bond that ran deeper than others could understand," even though their father constantly made them compete for his affection. We're told that their mother never wanted to move to Vermont, and she flees as soon as her husband is dead. We're told that after the reading of the will, Owen rode the high seas, avoiding commitment of any kind. But these complex situations have been left on the stove too long; all the nuance has been boiled away.
Perhaps that's because Greene can't decide if he's serving carpaccio de boeuf or Twinkies. The narrative switches between passages of pretentious biblical allusion ("the truth was that while he could return to Eden, on some vital level Eden could never return to him") to moments dredged from under the bridges of Madison County: "He made love to them in ways he knew they wanted to be made love to and he did so not out of some great sense of selflessness or passion for the particular woman, but rather because he understood what it was they ached for and he knew that there were few things in this life that came easily to him and this was one of them."
You'd expect that an author who can whip up gravy like this would at least have some fun in the kitchen. Anyone who's read Joanne Harris's Chocolat or Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent can still taste those delicious scenes, but Greene's descriptions of food preparation -- the only subject that receives any sustained examination in his book -- are disappointingly technical, more concerned with dicing, braising and seasoning than the erotic fun of it all.
It's galling that some authors, such as, say, Anita Shreve, must constantly defend themselves from the pejorative "romance" label no matter how well they write, while romantic fluff like this can pass itself off as "literary fiction." It's the same in the kitchen, of course: Women just cook, but men are chefs.
Check, please.
Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. The lives of brothers Charlie and Owen Bender are changed forever on the night their father walks into the Vermont woods with a death wish and a shotgun. The second shock comes when his suicide note bequeaths the family's restaurant to Charlie alone, while leaving Owen with instructions to follow his own path, wherever it may take him.Years later, the restaurant is a success. The void in Charlie's life, created by his beloved brother's absence, is finally filled when a passionate affair becomes a deeply satisfying marriage. And now prodigal son Owen is returning home, to be welcomed back into the family fold. But the cruel legacy that tore a brotherhood apart created wounds not easily healed . . . and there must be reckoning. Tragedy tears apart two brothers in this haunting tale of kinship, duplicity, and redemption from a "major new voice in American fiction" (Nelson DeMille).320 pp. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780060765811
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