Catching Heaven - Hardcover

Hall, Sands

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345439708 ISBN 13: 9780345439703

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2000

Synopsis

After a commercial audition leads to a severe anxiety attack, Maud Maxwell packs her candlesticks, Navajo wall hangings, and wooden spoons and flees Los Angeles, her stagnant relationship, and a faltering acting career. While driving along a lonely two-lane desert highway, she wonders: Where is the perfect love, the children, the security of a grounded life? Maud believes the answer lies in Marengo, a small town outside Santa Fe, where her sister Lizzie resides. Now Marengo beckons to Maud like the North Star on a dark night.

Yet Maud's life seems glamorous to Lizzie, who longs for the kind of motion that sweeps her sister from city to city, realizing her art. Everyone had always assumed Lizzie would be a successful artist. But instead of fame, she had three children by three different fathers. Instead of Paris, she settled in Marengo, teaching and painting pictures for a greeting card company.

But Maud is not the only one drawn to Marengo. Jake Arboles has returned home after spending two years in Nashville trying to break into the songwriting business. He and Lizzie were balanced on the edge of commitment until their relationship ended abruptly; a loss that has haunted them both ever since.

The complex bond and unspoken resentments between sisters . . . the legacy of children who feel they never fulfilled their parents' expectations . . . the aching search for home and connection and community . . . the ever-changing landscape of family and those who define it . . . Sands Hall weaves these powerful elements into a brilliantly written novel ripe with discovery and wonder—and the realization that holding on to someone is really about letting go.

About this title

About the Author

Sands Hall received her B.A. in drama from the University of California, Irvine, and attended the Advanced Training Program at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop and a second MFA in theatre arts from the University of Iowa. She has worked extensively as an actor, including seasons with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, the Old Globe Theatre, the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival, and the Foothill Theatre Company, where she also writes and directs. She teaches in the University of California at Davis Extension Programs, for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and for the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.

From the Back Cover

"In the small western town of Marengo one person arrives, one person returns, one person stays put. Each inhabits a private world of possibility, passion, and regret. Bring them together and you have Sand Halls's Catching Heaven, a book that contains some of the realest fictional people you'll ever meet. Elegantly constructed, vividly conveyed, with heart enough for three."
-KAREN JOY FOWLER

"Sands Hall is a wonderful writer, full of soul and feeling."
-ANNE LAMOTT

From the Inside Flap

ercial audition leads to a severe anxiety attack, Maud Maxwell packs her candlesticks, Navajo wall hangings, and wooden spoons and flees Los Angeles, her stagnant relationship, and a faltering acting career. While driving along a lonely two-lane desert highway, she wonders: Where is the perfect love, the children, the security of a grounded life? Maud believes the answer lies in Marengo, a small town outside Santa Fe, where her sister Lizzie resides. Now Marengo beckons to Maud like the North Star on a dark night.<br><br>Yet Maud's life seems glamorous to Lizzie, who longs for the kind of motion that sweeps her sister from city to city, realizing her art. Everyone had always assumed Lizzie would be a successful artist. But instead of fame, she had three children by three different fathers. Instead of Paris, she settled in Marengo, teaching and painting pictures for a greeting card company.<br><br>But Maud is not the only one drawn to Marengo. Jake Arboles has returned home after spending t

Reviews

Hall's first novel meticulously details Southwestern life and the rancor of middle-aged sibling rivalry in a variation on one of Aesop's venerable fables. Lizzie Maxwell, a 39-year-old single mother, is the country mouse who once thought she'd paint in Paris, but now designs greeting cards and teaches art in the historic town of Marengo. Her 41-year-old sister, Maud Maxwell, is the city mouse who lives in Los Angeles and acts in TV dramas, sitcoms and commercials. The rivalry between the two dates back to childhood: Lizzie believes their parents always loved Maud best. Fed up with her fading career and her long-time lover, Miles, a musician who refuses to give her a child, Maud walks out on an embarrassing commercial audition, and on Miles, too. She drives to Marengo, where Lizzie and her three children (each fathered by a different man, none of whom Lizzie has married) have been living for 15 years. The tensions between the sisters, who envy each other's lives, escalate over a nine-month period. Maud finds a small house and a job as a saloon singer and piano teacher. She has brief affairs with Driver, a Native American activist, and Rich, an abusive young cowboy, and assumes an ever-larger role in the life of Lizzie's middle child, third-grader Summer. Lizzie's jealousy grows when Maud develops relationships with Sam, an elderly American Indian who is Lizzie's best friend and was her first lover in Marengo, and Jake Arboles, the father of Lizzie's youngest child. Although frequently awkward in the telling, and spotted with clich?s, the novel conveys the pathos of the middle-aged realization that some optionsAincluding those of motherhood and artistic achievementAeventually expire. Major ad/promo; 5-city author tour. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This quirky, uneven first novel is laced with frequent flashes of brilliance and potential but often relies on clich s. Two sisters, New Mexico artist Lizzie and Hollywood actress Maud, slip and slide in the detritus of their very different childbearing decisions and life choices. Maud flees her L.A. television-commercial career and songwriter boyfriend and arrives in Marengo, NM, with a bruised psyche that even hard-nosed Lizzie is unable to mend. Lizzie, a college instructor and greeting-card artist, has purposefully woven a life with three children by three different fathers because she enjoys pregnancy and nursing far more than the complications of life with a man. Maud and Lizzie struggle for meaning and renewal in different ways, while an assortment of odd but mostly believable Marengo cowboys, Native Americans, impressionable young people, and Baby Theo's father, Jake, inhabit their worldsDsometimes comfortably, often painfully. For larger public libraries.DSusan A. Zappia, Paradise Valley Community Coll., Phoenix
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This elegantly crafted first novel is the story of converging lives, each separating at a pivotal turning point. Maud, just over 40, leaves her boyfriend, her home in Los Angeles, and her dreams of being a Hollywood success. She packs her car and drives to Marengo, New Mexico, where her sister Lizzie lives with her three young children, each of whom has a different father. Jake, the father of Lizzie's youngest, has just returned from Nashville where he fled, searching for success and love, when he and Lizzie separated. This is a complex story, messy as real life, and told in a most compelling way. Maud's love of theater is infectious, and she finds success on a new level, different and more fulfilling than the stressful years she spent in L.A. But a series of tragic family crises impacts the lives of Lizzie and her children, and she is forced to experience and express emotions that have long been buried. Eventually it is the tie of kinship and the value of connection that triumph. Grace Fill
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

MAUD

I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world

RICHARD II

The sky was still dark when Maud closed the motel door behind her.
Shivering, she crossed the street to the twenty-four-hour restaurant and
bought a cup of coffee from a yawning waitress. She'd left the freeway
late the day before, turning east onto a two-lane highway. Now it unfurled
ahead of her headlights, which she kept on high beam except for the rare
times a truck or car approached. She thought how like eyes the bright
lights coming at her were, and how easy it would be to swerve into their
oncoming glare.

An hour after dawn, a small town rose like a mirage out of the Arizona
desert. Maud passed the flickering sign of a burger stand, a gas station,
a battered motel before pulling in at Maria's Trading Post, whose
attractions--GAS! MUTTON! NAILS! FLOUR!--were advertised on a hand-lettered
sandwich board at the edge of the road.

The gas tanks were round-topped, old-fashioned. There seemed to be no
expectation that she pay before pumping the gas. The latch on the trigger
was broken. As Maud leaned against her car, holding the nozzle in the fill
hole, she had another wince of memory. Actually, it was more than a wince,
the rearranging of her shoulders she'd had to do when images of the
Cheesios audition, of Miles, of Nikos' acting class leered towards her as
she drove. A fragment of one of the days she'd worked on Tucker's Larks
pushed at her. When she'd filmed her short though vital scene with Tucker,
the actor hadn't actually been present. He was in Chicago playing baseball
for a handicapped children's benefit--they planned to film his lines later.
"Virtual Tucker," a crew member joked. In the sterile, muted space of a
police interrogation room that was the set, Maud emoted her half of the
scene to the plaid shoulder of the cameraman. Off to one side, the
scriptgirl read Tucker's dialogue in a flat, nasal voice. "Wait a bit
after each line," the director coached Maud. "I know that's tough, given
the, like, highly charged context of the scene, but we can't have any
overlap."

The trigger beneath her finger clicked. Maud pulled at it a few more
times, watching the numbers on the gas pump inch by. This
isn't acting, she'd wanted to tell the people gathered in the room,
wielding boom mikes, lights, makeup brushes. She replaced the nozzle in
its slot in the gas pump. I will not keep this form upon my head,
Constance, pulling at her hair, tells King John just before she exits and
goes mad. When there is such disorder in my wit.

The wind pushed out of the desert, flattening her skirt against her legs.
Maud closed her eyes before its chafing warmth, holding her hair back from
her face with fingers that smelled of gasoline. --'tis an unwanted
garden--no, that wasn't right--'tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed.
Fie on't, ah fie.

A large yellow car with fins, parked askew, guarded the door to Maria's
Trading Post. Its back seat was filled with newspapers. Both taillights
were broken, and the paint above the tire wells badly rusted.
The screen door screeched as she opened it, activating several buzzing
flies. A man leaned against the counter, watching a woman hack with a
cleaver at a glistening haunch of meat. On his cheek was a constellation
of pockmarks--a swirl, a small galaxy of indented scars. The door slapped
shut.

"Sorry," Maud said, using a French accent.

The woman gestured with the cleaver. "But get that car to Sara anyway."
It took a moment for Maud to realize that this instruction was not meant
for her. The man leveled dark eyes in her direction, then went back to
brooding on the skinned carcass. Maud made out angles of marbled fat and
blood that might have been part of a leg, cut off above the knee. A cowboy hat
sat beside this on the counter, jaunty, incongruent. She turned away, into an aisle, walking past huge cans of chili and hominy, cellophane packages of HoHos, boxes of cornflakes and saltines, loaves of Wonder bread. She stared at a shelf that held polyester shorts and sneakers, wondering if this man and this woman held their pockmarked faces against her, her and her kind.

"Need help?" the woman called.

Desperately, Maud thought. "Merci," she said. "I am just looking." She
didn't know why she'd started with the French accent but she didn't know
how to stop now. She stared down into hunched burlap sacks of flour,
beans, dried corn that stood at the back of the store. After searching for
an apple or an orange, she settled for a package of sunflower seeds from a
dusty display next to the cash register. She handed a twenty to the woman.
"I would take this, please. And I put the fifteen dollars of the gas in
the car." Her ability to use a French accent had always been rather
dismal. The woman looked at her sharply before lifting a cash box up from
beneath the counter.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0345439708
• ISBN 13: 9780345439703
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384