Genealogy: A Novel - Softcover

Casey, Maud

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060740892 ISBN 13: 9780060740894

Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks, 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 the Back Cover

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.

Reviews

Samantha Hennart is about to die alone from a brain aneurysm; Casey (The Shape of Things to Come) tells her story in flashback. Bernard, Sam's English professor husband, splits the scene in upstate New York (where they live as former urbanites) upon discovering his wife flagrante delicto with the carpenter; Sam had hired him to redo the bathroom so that she might treat her manic depressive daughter, Marguerite, with hydrotherapy. Instead, teen Marguerite runs away, landing in a locked ward in Queens, and son Ryan, a marijuana addict, has already escaped to California, where he haunts morgues. Casey seems to be arguing that the family fell apart because of Sam's essential lack of interest in her children. A better bet of what ails this foursome is utter implausibility: nothing is convincing about these characters, particularly the dialogue, which is heavy on irony and light on authenticity. "Where is your italicist?" Sam asks of her husband. "You know, the little man who jumps up and down behind you whenever you make a really important point?" He's nowhere to be found here. (May)
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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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060740892
• ISBN 13: 9780060740894
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 260