Ordinary Life: Stories - Hardcover

Berg, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679437460 ISBN 13: 9780679437468

Publisher: Random House, 2002

Synopsis

In this superb collection of short stories, the bestselling author of Open House and Talk Before Sleep takes us into the times in women’s lives when memories and events cohere to create a sense of wholeness, understanding, and change. In Ordinary Life, Mavis McPherson locks herself in the bathroom for a week, and no, she isn’t contemplating getting a divorce—she just needs some time to think, to take stock of her
life, and she comes to a surprising conclusion. In Today’s Special,a woman recognizes the solace she finds in the simple, timeless fare and atmosphere of the local diner and, ultimately, the harmony within her own spirit that familiar comforts can evoke. In White Dwarf, the secrets of a marriage are revealed as a couple passes the time with a seemingly insignificant word-association game. And in “Martin’s Letter to Nan,” the unforgettable husband and wife from Berg’s novel The Pull of the Moon engage in a new correspondence in which a different aspect of their marriage is revealed.

Elizabeth Berg’s fiction has been praised for its "brilliant insights about the human condition" (Detroit Free Press), and The Charlotte Observer has said that "Berg captures the way women think as well as any writer."Those same qualities of wisdom and insight are everywhere present in Ordinary Life.

About this title

Review

The characters in Ordinary Life, Elizabeth Berg's collection of limpid, gemlike stories, are poised at the edge of knowing, and it takes only quiet events--a kiss, the return of a freed bird--to nudge them toward whatever they need to face, even if it is behind them. The title story, in which an elderly woman named Mavis McPherson locks herself in the bathroom for a week, contains the germ of Berg's message about the importance of the small, the everyday. Mavis's urge to retreat began when she found a photograph from 1946 of her husband and brother-in-law asleep. Behind them was a table, on which sat a porcelain figure, now broken, that had been her mother's.

She'd wished she had more pictures of everything she used to have, thought Mavis, all her furniture, even her old refrigerator, and what was in it, too: the big, square blocks of butter in the ribbed glass container, the old flowered mixing bowls she used to have holding leftovers, covered with waxed paper and anchored with rubber bands. How could she have known that ordinary life would have such allure later on?

Berg, a writer from Chicago whose 2000 novel Open House was an Oprah book-club selection, should appeal to readers who like the straightforward prose and clarity of Sue Miller and Jayne Anne Phillips. --Regina Marler

From the Back Cover

“There’s something compelling about the way Berg knows her characters intimately, how she gets under their skin and leaves the reader with an indelible impression of lives challenged and changed.”
—The Seattle Times, about Open House

“Berg’s writing is to literature what Chopin’s études are to music—measured, delicate and impossible to walk away from until their completion.”
—Entertainment Weekly, about Range of Motion

“Elizabeth Berg is one of those rare souls who can play with truths as if swinging across the void from one trapeze to another.”
—Joan Gould, about Talk Before Sleep

“Elizabeth Berg writes with humor and a big heart about resilience, loneliness, love and hope. And the transcendence that redeems.”
—Andre Dubus, about Durable Goods

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0679437460
• ISBN 13: 9780679437468
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192