Stay Here With Me: A Memoir - Hardcover

Olmstead, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805041621 ISBN 13: 9780805041620

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1996

Synopsis

The author recounts his experiences growing up on a New Hampshire farm

About this title

About the Author

Robert Olmstead is currently writer-in-residence at Dickinson College.

Reviews

A novelist's sometimes lyrical, sometimes taut reminiscences of the summer of 1972 read very much like an appealing, slightly old-fashioned coming-of-age novel. It was the summer before Olmstead's senior year in high school, the summer he fell in love, the summer his alcoholic father lost his job, the summer his autocratic grandfather learned he would die of cancer. The setting is the grandfather's New Hampshire farm during the frantic-and sometimes comically irrational-preparations for getting the place in order for an aerial photograph. A few flashback memories-within-memories cover such things as a cow-buying trip to Canada and a hitch-hiking jaunt to his girlfriend's college campus in upstate New York. Flash-forwards suggest what will happen to most of the people involved. The lush and adjective-filled descriptions of Olmstead's first serious affair are lovingly rendered, but the book is strongest and most effective during its more austere moments, such as an evocative description of the finesse required to drive cows for their morning milking and a scene in which the author-with weary understanding-deals with his hungover father. With its remembered conversations and novelistic touches, this is a quietly moving adolescent memoir in the tradition of William Humphrey's powerful Farther Off from Heaven.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

With a simplicity of language belying a deeply rich and subtle imagery, novelist Olmstead (American by Land, 1993, etc.) produces a variegated narrative, dreamlike in its reflection of passing youth yet rooted in the earthy prose of farm life, and always achingly hued by an 18-year-old's nascent awareness of mortality. ``Memory is always more true to the present mind than to the past,'' writes Olmstead, ``always more true to itself than to anything else.'' Looking back at his life on his grandfather's New Hampshire dairy farm, Olmstead presents that late adolescent moment when change was imminent but just barely forestalled. Soon to come would be the untimely deaths of his two childhood friends, his father's passing following a long unhappy spiral of alcoholism and failed rehabilitation, and the slow, cancerous death of his grandfather. But also here is Olmstead's initiatory, bittersweet love affair, often described in synesthetic terms, as is much of this perceptive account: ``I knew no one who spoke as she did, knew no one whose words were like touch.'' As can only be fathomed by the adult narrator, there are impending changes in the younger man's life, although the teenager has the wit to infer these changes in the aging of the old farm hands, the dismantling of an ancient grain silo, and the final gathering of his grandfather's siblings on word of the old man's disease. The daily prosaisms among the family and with the hired help are gently humorous yet ineluctably tinged with regret over the transience of familiar things. As the teenager gazes upon his love, he notes, ``And then I'd remember how we were in a seam of life on this very day and would soon be pulled from it by our ambitions, by the roads we were on.'' Written with great-hearted love and compassion in a language full of human longing and frailty, this is a book for anyone who was once young. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Olmstead follows his beautiful novels and short story collections with an equally beautiful memoir of his young manhood in rural New England. His luscious style--with its poetic cadences and intense imagery--threatens to overwhelm the material but doesn't. What Olmstead says and how he says it work in splendid integration to deliver enrapturing prose. From the soul-embracing experience of sitting on a mountaintop, to the physical and emotional specialness of first love, to the never-to-be-gotten-over effects of an alcoholic father, Olmstead tests his memory, and the findings are exceptionally poignant. Brad Hooper

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805041621
• ISBN 13: 9780805041620
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 207