In the Country of Desire - Hardcover

Garrett, Leslie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060168803 ISBN 13: 9780060168803

Publisher: Harpercollins, 1992

Synopsis

With her grandmother dead, Willa Rheinman feels the time is right for her to seek out the mother she has never known, a decision that teaches her about her family history of brutality, drunkenness, and religion

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

Twenty-six years after his award-winning debut (The Beasts, 1966), Garrett delivers this grim second novel about incest and its consequences for mother and child. Willa Rhineman, an unschooled, 16-year-old country girl from Pineville, New Jersey, has just buried her grandmother Lydia in the woods and is leaving for the city to look for her long-lost mother Madeleine. It's 1980, but the sonorous prose suggests a time even earlier than 1947, the year Lydia Wier hired Emil Rhineman as her handyman. Emil is a weak, fearful, fitfully charming ladies' man who turns violent when drunk; Lydia is a strong, undemonstrative, religious-minded control freak, determined to tame Emil's ``darkly fluctuant character,'' even if it means marrying him. Their daughter Madeleine is hated by Lydia and adored by Emil, quite innocently at first; but on her 15th birthday, on a day trip to Atlantic City, he deflowers her. When she gives birth to Willa, she will not acknowledge the baby beyond breast-feeding it. Soon after, she gravitates to the city and (having zero self-esteem) to a hip black lover guaranteed to treat her mean; after him comes a Valium habit and a suicide attempt, until she disappears into thin air in 1967. Willa tracks down her mother's old cronies, pathetic Sixties ghosts like the heroin-addicted lesbian pimp Mary Vandel, but finds nothing of her mother except her journal; then, in an idiotic trick ending, she solves the riddle of Madeleine's disappearance and promptly kills herself, getting it right the first time, unlike Emil or Madeleine: game, set, and match to death. Save for a scattering of powerful moments, an unenjoyable and disorienting read, as we are bounced between three time-periods, four principals (all of them victims, according to Garrett's iron determinism), and a variety of influences, ranging from Dreiser early on to a medley of Purdy, West, and Baldwin in the scenes of big-city decadence. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

Desperately unhappy people leading sordid lives as they search unavailingly for love populate this tedious second novel by the author of The Beast , which won the Maxwell Perkins Prize in 1966. Despite such trendy topics as drugs and promiscuity, this is a curiously old-fashioned novel reminiscent of Dreiser's often plodding stories of lower-class people caught in lurid circumstances, with characters akin to Sherwood Anderson's grotesques--but without Anderson's brilliant touch. In 1960, Willa Rhineman, a 16-year-old New Jersey farm girl whose strong-willed grandmother has kept her isolated from and ignorant of the modern world, flees to Manhattan in search of the mother she has never known. Her precarious existence there is related in flashback counterpoint with the circumstances of her mother Madeleine's life, a desolate saga that includes incest, drugs, alcohol and a slavish adoration of one of the novel's most loathsome characters, an arrogant, sadistic poet. Actually, none of the novel's characters is remotely appealing; even Willa, a combination of innocence and native shrewdness, never captures the reader's interest. The melodramatic ending dissipates what little credibility the novel had achieved.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harpercollins
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0060168803
• ISBN 13: 9780060168803
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 375