Mr. Ives' Christmas - Hardcover

Hijuelos, Oscar

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060171316 ISBN 13: 9780060171315

Publisher: Harper/Collins, 1995

Synopsis

A moving work from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author concerns the loss of faith endured by Mr. Ives, a businessman whose world is shattered when his son, who is studying for the priesthood, violently dies at Christmas. 100,000 first printing. $125,000 ad/promo. Tour.

About this title

Reviews

The signal event of this novel?the shooting of the protagonist's son?is announced early, and the rest of the book is imbued with a melancholy only occasionally illuminated by spiritual revelation or insight. Edward Ives is a foundling, adopted by a widowed print shop manager and raised uneventfully in an idyllic?though Depression-era?New York City of egg creams, stickball and melting-pot color. Ives's dark looks and his father's long history of working amiably with Cuban pressmen incline him toward a sympathy with Hispanics and their culture, which conveniently anchors Hijuelos in a world he knows well. As a child, Ives shows a penchant for drawing, and he meets his future wife, Annie MacGuire, in a class at the Art Students League. Their first child, Robert (or Roberto), born in 1950, is murdered at age 17 on the streets of New York by a Puerto Rican teenager. The case is celebrated?Robert had just decided to enter the priesthood and was killed for a measly $10; by his side was found a shopping bag full of record albums?Christmas presents carefully chosen for each member of his family. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Hijuelos showed he can sharply evoke a vibrant, multicultural New York, capturing its music, its menace and its smell. Here, however, every storefront is darkened by the grief of Edward Ives, and every note is tamped. It is as if the lovelorn Nestor of Mambo Kings has returned from the dead to play his sad arias in a world?and a book?absent his lively, spirited brother, Cesar. The author's attempts to render all this as a Dickensian tale of redemption through dignified suffering?Dickens is invoked more than a dozen times?are crude and work no wonders. Not even a long-foreshadowed and deferred meeting at the end of the book between Ives and his son's murderer helps: "Nothing monumental transpired. Niceties were exchanged." Same for the book. BOMC selection; author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

With each novel, from the Pulitzer Prize^-winning Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) to The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien (1993), Hijuelos has grown more contemplative, more intrigued with the mystical, and more concerned with morality. In this magnetically tender tale, he explores the complexities of spirituality through the medium of a most unusual hero, Mr. Ives. A foundling, Ives' origins are a mystery although his appearance seems to indicate Spanish blood, and, indeed, Ives, a Manhattanite, is drawn to the society of his Cuban and Puerto Rican neighbors. Although his ethnicity is unknown, his devotion to Catholicism and his gift for drawing are indisputable, and they shape his introspective, quietly productive, and ever generous life. Given to much spiritual musing, Ives is stunned when he experiences a full-blown mystical vision on Madison Avenue one brilliant winter afternoon, an epiphany that both elates and troubles him. He passes his spiritualism on to his son, Robert, whose own visions compel him to enter a seminary. But Robert is murdered, shot at point-blank range outside the church just before Christmas. Ives is devastated, his faith shaken to the core. As Hijuelos traces his hero's quest for enlightenment in the wake of this tragedy, he describes all the forms prayer takes, ponders the true value of charity, and celebrates our aptitude for forgiveness. This is a magnificently sad and enchanting novel, a celebration, ultimately, of giving and of grace. Donna Seaman

For Edward Ives, a graphic artist employed by a Madison Avenue advertising firm, Christmas has always been an emotionally charged holiday. It was during the Christmas season that Edward's foster father first visited him at the foundling home, and at Christmas a few years later Edward was finally adopted. Ives met his wife at an art students' Christmas party, and-most importantly-it was during the 1967 Christmas season that Ives's 17-year-old son was senselessly gunned down as he left choir practice. Ives has never fully recovered from the killing, and his unshakable depression threatens to destroy his marriage, as does his strange obsession with rehabilitating the murderer. It is significant that Mr. Ives's most prized possession is a signed edition of Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Hijuelos, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of Cuban exile, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, breathes new life into the Victorian Christmas genre. Highly recommended.
--Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper/Collins
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060171316
• ISBN 13: 9780060171315
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256