Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery - Hardcover

Brown, John Gregory

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039567025X ISBN 13: 9780395670255

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994

Synopsis

John Gregory Brown's luminous first novel takes on the enduring themes of great Southern fiction - family, race, and faith - in a heartbreaking tale of identity, devotion, and regret. At its rich emotional center is the Eagen family of New Orleans, Irish Catholics of "mixed blood" in a city where race defines destiny.
The mesmerizing story begins with the collapse of a bridge and its consequences for Thomas Eagen, a troubled young doctor whose unforeseen journey still haunts his daughter, Meredith, years later. Still puzzling over her father's abrupt decision to leave his wife, the stepmother she had grown to love, Meredith ponders the questions that blinded Thomas to his children's needs. Why did his mother, a proud black woman, abandon his devout Catholic father, and why did Thomas's own marriage fail?
The elusive answers to these questions lie for Meredith in the fateful return of the black handyman who holds in his memory the full story of the family's past. Through his clear-eyed account and her stepmother's tender letters, Meredith begins to unravel the misunderstandings that led them all, long ago, to tragedy.
John Gregory Brown travels through this fertile Southern landscape with resonating grace, humor, and compassion, shedding light on the virtues and dangers of family loyalty and the power and limitations of faith. In praise of Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, Lee Smith described this novel as "shot through with love that transcends time and race." It introduces a writer of rare sensibility and accomplishment.

About this title

About the Author

John Gregory Brown lives in Virginia and teaches creative writing at Sweet Briar College. He is the author of The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton LaFleur and Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, which received a Steinbeck Award and the Lillian Smith Award. Audubon's Watch was selected as the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year.

Review

"John Gregory Brown's compassionate vision of human destiny is one that contains both suffering and the possibility of deliverance...For a book like Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, the label 'first novel' seems grudging and dismissive. Artistry like this is unclassifiable."
                                                            --  New York Times Book Review
 
 
"I wish more people today would attempt books like this one, novels that take on the big questions, the eternal verities, and, without pretense and a whole lot of claptrap, address the difficulty of finding meaning and significance in life. For this is the stuff of which classics are made and what literature, certainly, is all about. That John Gregory Brown had the nerve to square off before such issues in his first novel is by itself laudable. The fact that he wrote a fine story with believable, memorable characters in the process is reason for applause...
            "The story is a moving one, and sorrowful because so ordinary and so familiar...The refreshing thing about the book, in addition to the timelessness of the situation the characters find themselves in, is that implicit in their struggle is the assumption that all the effort is worth it, that there are such absolutes as right and wrong, and that locating oneself in this common grid of guilt and forgiveness is incumbent, part and parcel, of finding out who you are. In a word, redemption."
                                                            --  Los Angeles Times
 
"What Brown's novel renders so elegantly is the entrenchment of abandonment and sorrow, of deceit and mendacity, from one generation to the next...Much of the magnificence of Decorations in a Ruined Cemeteryis the result of the author's decision to create imaginative voices other than his own. Of the three narrators of his story, two are female and the third is an African-American man. To use those voices must have been a challenge for the writer, but the decision was a triumph for his novel. John Gregory Brown is both the beneficiary of and a worthy successor to our finest Southern writers."
                                                            -  Chicago Tribune
 
"In its Southern-ness, Brown's novel has an antique quality worth admiring and conserving. His Southerners take care in speaking to each other. The conversations between black Southerners and whites are sometimes of necessity wary and vigilant, but the characters are listening to each other. Brown's stretches of careful and melodious writing make his first novel something much better than the proverbial promising debut."
                                                            -- Washington Post
 
"Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery is a sensitive, graceful piece of writing with an emotional candor about it that speaks well for John Gregory Brown's future life as a writer."
--  Boston Globe
 
 
"Reading it is to rush willingly and excitedly across a minefield, waiting for blasts of revelation...Brown is a dancing funambulist of a writer who shifts back and forth between events."
                                                            --  New Statesman and Society
 
 
"An intricate, musical elaboration and exploration...The opening sentence [is] a small masterpiece in itself."
                                                            --  San Francisco Chronicle
 
 
"Moving, wise, and wonderful..."
                                                            -- The (London) Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 039567025X
• ISBN 13: 9780395670255
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256