Coda - Hardcover

Astley, Thea

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0399139664 ISBN 13: 9780399139666

Publisher: Putnam Adult, 1994

Synopsis

With her husband gone and her memory failing, Kathleen faces old age alone, until her children's callousness and self-absorption force her to take dramatic steps to retain her beloved freedom. By the author of The Slow Natives.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

A spare, sharp-boned bird of a novel, whose song is wrenchingly sad yet full of indomitable spirit. Astley (The Slow Natives, 1993, etc.) writes of old age, of life slipping past and freedom lost, and of loneliness. As Kathleen, dozing and daydreaming her way into decrepitude and oblivion, looks back over her life, the ``pictures came in savagely illuminated splats,'' edged by disappointment and unnameable desire. The setting is Australia, but the vast emptiness surrounding Astley's characters is a symptom of psychology rather than setting. Kathleen recalls her marriage: ``seeking the idyll yet somehow missing it...Solitariness nibbling away even in the middle of parties, dances, pillow-talk.'' Her husband, ``a tensed sales clerk with the distant crazed eyes of a visionary unable to satisfy his yearnings,'' disappeared into the jungle, searching for his ``new Jerusalem,'' then succumbed, quite willingly, to cancer. Then there were--and are--her two children. The monstrously selfish Shamrock (Sham) took a year off to find herself (`` `Where will you look, dear?' Kathleen had asked mildly'') en route to fulfillment as the wife of a crooked politician and hostess of opulent dinner parties. The somewhat less monstrously selfish Brian (Brain) is miserably married, miserably adulterous, and prone to quoting Tennyson over his breakfast bran. Kathleen--except when available to baby-sit--has become nothing but a burden, a threat to her children's cherished, illusory liberty. When Sham dumps her unceremoniously in a retirement community called Passing Downs, Kathleen makes one last dash for her own freedom. ``It's time to go feral,'' she announces to a stranger. ``Tribes of feral grandmothers holed up in the hills, just imagine it, refusing to take on those time-honoured mindings and moppings up after the little ones while the big ones jaunt into the distance.'' Astley is a marvelous writer and a hilarious, merciless, and poignant truth-teller. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

Prize-winning Australian writer Astley (The Slow Natives) has written another chronicle in which domestic lives are lived at uncomprehending cross-purposes and disappointing offspring exact petty revenge. But while this new novel bears her trademark wit, it is more sour and downbeat than most of her previous work. Here Astley suggests that the aged have no place in an increasingly fragmented society. Widowed and elderly, Kathleen is starting to lose her bearings. Alienated from her grown children and isolated from all meaningful human contact, she roams the town mall, recalling the past: her dismal marriage and unfulfilling existence. Meanwhile, her son Brain (formerly Brian) indulges in one money-losing scheme after another, and her mean, selfish daughter, Shamrock, sells Kathleen's house and possessions and consigns her mother to a home. Astley paints a bleak portrait of contemporary Australia, a land of malls, automobiles and disrupted families. Even lovers seem never quite to connect, and a number of Astley's characters resort to grand and finally meaningless gestures to reaffirm their existence-at least to themselves. With every major character paralyzed in some way, this is a difficult novel to love; in addition, the flashbacks and shifts from Kathleen's viewpoint to her son's are sometimes confusing. Still, sparks of humor provide balance, humanizing a fictional landscape that otherwise promises little hope or compassion.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Putnam Adult
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0399139664
• ISBN 13: 9780399139666
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1