ROSE REASON - Softcover

Mary Flanagan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0349102740 ISBN 13: 9780349102740

Publisher: ABACUS, 1992

Synopsis

A strict Catholic upbringing in a small Maine factory town leads Rose to develop a self-destructive sense of reason, which she carries with her throughout her life, until a devastating relationship finally helps her to believe in herself.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

Expatriate Flanagan, writing from London, trains her gaze back across the Atlantic--at least in the strongest sections of this second novel (following Trust, 1988, and the collection Bad Girls, 1985). It's the story of Rose Mullen, a girl from the mean, narrow world of a Maine milltown, ``a shallow pit that rimmed the lives of its inhabitants, keeping them tame and biased so that they worked well and were content with short-term improvements.'' Rose's young years are harrowing, for she loses her mother, is basically abandoned by her father, and fobbed off on a spinster aunt who lives for the joy of attending Mass. A love affair with a rover named Travis shows her what she must do--leave, regardless of the fact that it means lying her way out of town and leaving dear old Aunt Bernie high and dry. Her search for Travis (who's disappeared, as so many of Rose's men will do) takes her to N.Y.C. in the Sixties, complete with stoned-out loft parties, art films, rambunctious sex, and weird makeup. But the New York scene eventually breaks up, and Rose sets off on a long float around Europe, ending up nursing an old Czech stroke victim in London and pining after a duplicitous fellow named Miles, from whom it takes her much too long to cut loose. Flanagan is talented--a bottomless well of detail and apercus, wonderfully evocative on the Sixties, full of mystery and suggestiveness. But her plot, which starts out not only confident but rooted in credibility, loses itself and then turns febrile, making one wonder in the end what all the bother's been about. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

In this uneven confessional novel, narrator Frances Mullen traces her life story from her Catholic girlhood in a Maine mill town to her bohemian existence in 1960s Manhattan to the English boarding house where she now works as a maid. After her mother's death, Frances is sent by her adored, ineffectual father to live with her aunt, a religious spinster. Upon her confirmation she takes the name Rose, hoping to take on a new identity, "a magic garment to cover my sorrow." But in her efforts to transform herself she cannot overcome her persistent sense of abandonment, and as she grows older Rose continually pursues men who--like her father--will disappoint and leave her. Flanagan ( Trust ) powerfully evokes Rose's pinched life with the repressive Aunt Bernie, but the novel's second half unravels into strained and diffused emotions. Roland Miles, the sinister Englishman who eventually stirs the violence smoldering beneath Rose's passivity, is less a man than a metaphor for elusive love. Like too much of this novel, he is a symbol in search of significance.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: ABACUS
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0349102740
• ISBN 13: 9780349102740
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 480