Dwelling Places: A Novel (VINITA HAMPTON Wright) - Hardcover

Wright, Vinita Hampton

3.49

286 ratings by Goodreads

9780060790806: Dwelling Places: A Novel (VINITA HAMPTON Wright)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060790806 ISBN 13: 9780060790806

Publisher: HarperOne, 2006

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In Beulah, Iowa, widow women all over town garden in the clothes of deceased husbands. From a distance, they often look like small–framed men. They keep their husbands' clothes because it's wasteful to throw away hats and shirts that still have wear in them. They wear the clothes in memory of the men they have survived, even after the scent of them has been laundered away.

From its remarkable opening lines to its satisfying, redemptive close, Dwelling Places is a novel of plain beauty and profound emotion.

When Mack Barnes arrives home from a stay in the psych ward, he is just beginning to name his troubles, and the entire family must recognize their collective wounds. After six generations of farming, Mack's family has had to call it quits – just barely saving the family home, but at the cost of Mack's brother Alex and father Taylor Sr. Mack's mother Rita perseveres by trying to take care of everyone, everyone that is, except herself. Jodie, Mack's wife, has survived so much and coped for so long that she cannot recognize her own desperation. Her only remnant of religious faith consisting of old hymns she sings just to keep herself from total distraction, Jodie seeks solace in an ill–advised affair with a local teacher. Kenzie, Mack and Jodie's fourteen year old daughter, has turned to an idealized Jesus for comfort, while Taylor, at seventeen, deals wtih his troubles by becoming a Goth, convincing his little sister that he's given over to Satan.

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About the Author:

Vinita Hampton Wright, a novelist and editor who conducts creative writing workshops at conferences and retreats around the country, is the author of the novella The Winter Seeking and the novels Velma Still Cooks in Leeway and Grace at Bender Springs, as well as numerous nonfiction titles.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. In this extraordinarily well-observed, contemplative novel, Wright focuses on a present-day Iowa family reeling from one tragedy after another. Its matriarch, Rita Mae Barnes, copes with the loss of her husband, son and farm by taking care of everyone around her. Her surviving son, Mack, struggles with depression serious enough to warrant a stay in a psychiatric hospital, while his desperately tired wife, Jodie, attempts to raise their children and support the family in his absence. It's not an easy task: their 14-year-old daughter, Kenzie, becomes enamored of a Christian cult and a mentally ill 35-year-old man, and their 17-year-old son, Young Taylor, slouches around town in full goth attire, baiting local law enforcement and loitering at the cemetery. Despite the bleakness of these circumstances, Wright manages an astounding level of honesty and plenty of wry humor without falling into the nihilism that pervades A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel to which this story bears an intriguing resemblance. And unlike the bulk of Christian fiction, in which characters travel predictable paths to wholesome happy endings, this novel eschews hackneyed pietism in favor of an authentic portrait of people who do not completely regret their mistakes and are still learning how to accept God's consolation. (Feb.)
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