Garbo Laughs - Hardcover

Hay, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0771037929 ISBN 13: 9780771037924

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, 2003

Synopsis

A Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year
A Quill & Quire Top Five Canadian Fiction Book of the Year
A Maclean’s Top Ten Book of the Year


Elizabeth Hay’s runaway national bestseller is a funny, sad-eyed, deliciously entertaining novel about a woman caught in a tug of war between real life and the films of the past. Inflamed by the movies she was deprived of as a child, Harriet Browning forms a Friday-night movie club with three companions-of-the-screen: a boy who loves Frank Sinatra, a girl with Bette Davis eyes, and an earthy sidekick named after Dinah Shore. Into this idiosyncratic world, in time with the devastating ice storm of 1998, come two refugees from Hollywood: Harriet’s Aunt Leah, the jaded widow of a screenwriter blacklisted in the 1950s, and her sardonic, often overbearing stepson, Jack. They bring harsh reality and illuminate the pull of family and friendship, the sting of infidelity and revenge, the shock of illness and sudden loss. Poignant, brilliant, and delightfully droll, Garbo Laughs reveals how the dramas of everyday life are sometimes the most astonishing of all.

About this title

About the Author

Elizabeth Hay is the author of two highly acclaimed, bestselling novels. Her first novel, A Student of Weather (2000), won the CAA MOSAID Technologies Inc. Award for Fiction and the TORGI Award, and was a finalist for The Giller Prize, the Ottawa Book Award, and the Pearson Canada Reader’s Choice Award at The Word on the Street. Her most recent novel, Garbo Laughs (2003), won the Ottawa Book Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. She is also the author of Crossing the Snow Line (stories, 1989); The Only Snow in Havana (non-fiction, 1992); Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (non-fiction, 1993), and Small Change (stories, 1997), which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award, and the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her stories have been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories, The Journey Prize Anthology, and The Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women, edited by Rosemary Sullivan. She has won a National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Fiction and a Western Magazine Award for Fiction. In 2002, she received the prestigious Marian Engel Award.

Elizabeth Hay lives in Ottawa.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the Back Cover

“Garbo, Brando, Sean Connery… the stars are out in one Ottawa home that’s experiencing video heaven.… A sparkling demonstration of Hollywood’s hold on our fantasies – and its awkward fit with our earthbound selves.”
–Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“This rich, lovely novel makes us think about the ambivalences and contradictions of relationships and the patience of love, and see in a new way the shape of a fern frond. It also makes us want to reread Jane Austen and to find out whether the video store has a copy of Rear Window or Singing in the Rain.”
–Quill & Quire (starred review)

“I loved it. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like it. All the details are so right – about the time, about the characters. It was like reading Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood (one of my favorite books) or Empire Falls by Richard Russo, where you marvel about the confidence and exactness the author has for place and people. The characterization of Harriet and Ken is wonderful and rich. The way their passion for movies is tied into the plot is amazing. (I’ve resolved to go rent some of the ones they were so absorbed by, many of which I’ve seen before, just because they gave me a different way of looking at them.) And then I cried for about the last 25 pages. Who could ask more from a book? I think it’s an extraordinary book – one of those extremely intelligent books that just bowl you over with a great narrative and the obvious warmth the author feels for her characters.”
–Pauline Ziniker, Bookseller, Country Bookshelf

“I want to nominate Garbo Laughs by Elizabeth Hay for BookSense for October. She is a wonderful writer with a rich prose style and I’m hoping this can be her breakout novel like Bel Canto was for Ann Patchett. I found this novel to be very moving, with its memorable characters, amazing voices and wonderful movie trivia and literary allusions. It made me laugh. It made me cry. It was like no other book I remember.”
–Andy Lillich, Bookseller, University of Oregon Bookstore

“I’m only to page 82 of Elizabeth Hay’s new – did I say ‘wonderful, new’ – novel and it occurs to me that more than one smart-aleck reviewer will title their critiques ‘Guise and Dolls.’ What a pleasure it is to read a book that you want to read.”
–Richard Bachmann, Bookseller, A Different Drummer Bookstore

“Greta Garbo is one of many movie stars who fascinate the alluringly eccentric characters found in the latest tale by one of Canada’s most gifted novelists. In this witty, gracefully choreographed, and potent Ottawa-based family drama, Hay ponders our enthrallment to movies, conjuring a cast of ardent souls who cope with a catastrophic ice storm, unwelcome guests, undermined dreams, distressing infatuations, lingering illnesses, and sudden death by finding solace, even guidance, in classic films…. Imaginative, droll, and incisive, Hay’s profound tale of attempted escape and accepted responsibility, of found joy and dreaded sorrow, deftly explores the dangers and benefits of fantasy.”
- Booklist (starred review)

From the Inside Flap

From the celebrated, bestselling author of the Giller Prize finalist A Student of Weather, comes a darkly funny, sad-eyed novel about a woman caught in a tug of war between real love and movie love ? and real love doesn?t stand a chance


Elizabeth Hay?s virtuoso second novel is set in Ottawa in the 1990s and tells the quixotic tale of tall, thin Harriet Browning, inflamed by the movies she was deprived of as a child. Bent on seeing everything she has missed, she forms a Friday-night movie club with three companions-of-the-screen: a boy who loves Frank Sinatra, a girl with Bette Davis eyes, and an earthy sidekick named Dinah for Dinah Shore.

Breaking in upon this idiosyncratic world, in time with the devastating ice storm of 1998, come two refugees from Hollywood, the jaded widow of a blacklisted screenwriter and her sardonic stepson. They bring harsh reality. In the shakeup that follows their arrival, new alliances form, casualties mount, and old obsessions linger as winter turns into the warmest spring on record and the movie club gradually and inevitably dissolves.

In this deliciously entertaining novel, which goes straight to the core of our innermost longings and desires, Elizabeth Hay confirms her status as one of Canada?s most original and accomplished voices.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Kenny lay awake in the smallest room in the house. It had a narrow bed, a narrow desk, and a cupboard-closet that started partway up the wall. In the dark he could make out his desk covered in books – including his bible, the movie guide of 1996 – and his clothes hanging from a hook on the open cupboard door. With his dad he had gone to a used–clothing store and bought the oversized brown–and–white checked–tweed sports jacket and the red–and–pink tie and the long-sleeved blue shirt, his gangster outfit, and his dad had let him borrow, indefinitely, his black fedora. From Bolivia. His dad was a traveller.

Kenny loved Frank Sinatra. His mom – he couldn’t believe this – thought Marlon Brando was better.

“Who’s better?” he’d asked her.

“Not again,” she said.

“No, wait. Just this time. Who’s better? Frank Sinatra or Marlon Brando?”

“Are you ready for this?” she said. “Can you take it? I’d have to say Marlon Brando.”

“You’re crazy, you’re nuts. I ­can’t believe what I’m hearing.”

She laughed, as one nut laughs with another, since she too wore her movie heart on her sleeve. “He’s a better actor. He’s better-looking. Which ­isn’t to say I ­don’t like Frank Sinatra. I do. At least, I like the young Frank Sinatra when he looked like Glenn Gould. He was an awful thug when he got older.”

Kenny turned to Dinah, who lived down the street and never minded his questions and always answered them to his liking. “Who do you like better, Frank Sinatra or Marlon Brando?”

“Frank,” she said.

“Me too.” He was very excited. “You think he’s a good singer?”

“The best.”

“My mom says Marlon Brando is better.”

“Marlon Brando is good.”

“But he’s not better than Frank Sinatra?”

“Frankie,” said Dinah, “is divine.” But Dinah had always gone for skinny, serious, temperamental guys, until recently.

They were in the middle days of November, and all the hesitations of early fall, the tentative snowfalls and bewitching spells of balminess, had given way to sudden cold. From under the covers, in the pale green light that came through the curtains, Kenny heard sounds – soft sounds ”– that froze the blood in his veins. There was tapping, sawing, tiny running feet on the porch roof outside his window. Rats. He knew it would be hard for a rat to walk up the wall, but in the night anything was possible. Then water, flowing water. Then scratching. Bugs were in the walls. Big-eyed, hairy, losing their grip. He heard one land, very softly, on the windowsill beside his head and was about to call out when something else, something hard, slapped against a window.

It sounded like Jean Simmons slapping Marlon Brando across the face.

It worked. After that it was quiet.

Frankie was good in that movie, and Frankie hated Marlon so Kenny hated him too. Jean Simmons was pretty nice; though, on the whole, he had to say he preferred Vivian Blaine.

He closed his eyes. For a while he pictured the fight, Marlon cracked over the head with a chair, Jean Simmons drunk and funny and throwing punches. He wondered if Havana was really like that. His dad would know. Then Big Julie was rolling dice in the sewer and Nathan Detroit was eating Mindy’s cheesecake with a fork.

In the morning he opened his eyes when his mom opened the curtains and he said, “Let’s watch Guys and Dolls.”

“Why not Take Me Out to the Ball Game? You ­haven’t seen that one yet.”

“Is Frankie in it?”

“Of course,” she said.


***


Three nights later the slow, searching sound of a taxi came up the wet street and stopped directly below Kenny’s window. A door slammed, the taxi pulled away, and then Lew Gold was heading up the steps and Kenny was heading down. His sister was on his heels.

Their house was two storeys high and made of yellow brick. The wood trim in the hallway was American chestnut, a tree wiped out by blight in the 1920s. What remained of the old forests was inside. Everything outside had come inside, even the movies. The banister Kenny never bothered to hold on to was American chestnut too, golden brown in colour, but the steps themselves were white pine from the forests of white pine that used to grow where this house was standing. Lew’s grandfather had built the house in 1928; after he died it passed out of the family, until last spring, when the grandson had the pleasure of buying it back.

Lew came through the door, and then what a tangle of big and little limbs there was. What a scene of affection. He looked so tanned and lighthearted, so eager and beloved and beaming, that Harriet, standing in the living-room doorway, couldn’t resist. She said, “Something unpleasant happened while you were gone.”

“Doña,” he smiled, reaching over the kids to take into his arms his northern-eyed, meatless-on-principle, strangely yearning wife. “I’ve missed you,” he said. And the gift, wrapped in a piece of newspaper in his shirt pocket, got pressed a little flatter.

It was late – a Sunday night – but he could tell by the look in her eye that she was still under the influence of her Friday-­night movie. A certain distancing look she directed his way that made him feel he was blocking her view. You’re a better door than a window, he heard her thinking, why don’t you sit down and remove your hat? Then she would be alone again with Sean Connery or Gene Kelly or Jeff Bridges or Cary Grant. The list was endless. He had been gone for two weeks, to distant parts, and she had spent it with who was it this time? A glance at the video box on top of the tv gave him his answer: Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in Take Me Out to the Ball Game. How could a man compete?

Edition details

• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0771037929
• ISBN 13: 9780771037924
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384