Small Victories - Hardcover

Bingham, Sallie

3.4

5 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0944072208 ISBN 13: 9780944072202

Publisher: Zoland Books, 1992

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When Big Tom, a wealthy cousin, decides that Louise's sister, Shelby, should be institutionalized, Louise is determined to oppose him and finds an unexpected ally in Young Tom, her cousin's son

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From Kirkus Reviews:

``There isn't much sap in this family anymore. There isn't much juice.'' This striking dissection and display of a family echoes the author's memoir, Passion and Prejudice (1989), in which she exposed what she saw as the smothering mores of the Bingham family empire. Here is Bingham's fictional intuition of the minor miseries and pleasures within the great safe house of enveloping civility--in 1958 North Carolina, Kentucky, and Cambridge, Mass. Spare, plain, single, 45-year-old Louise Macelvens is pleased with small victories few would understand, like persuading sister Shelby--huge, damp, severely mentally impaired--to eat breakfast. Tending Shelby gives Louise substance (``after all...we are born to manage, not to love''). Soon, however, generous cousin ``Big Tom,'' a Kentucky state senator, will ship Shelby, fresh from a frothing fit, to a mental hospital--for Louise's sake. Louise aims to get her home. In Cambridge, meanwhile, college student Tom, 19, only surviving son of Big Tom and wife Mugsie (his charming, ``odd'' brother Paul has been dead a year) flounders in his loneliness, his guilts, and sexual infantilism. He loses a girl and speeds home, distraught, to his old nurse (and maybe his blue baby blanket?). The parents glide around Tom, seemingly impervious, yet worrying- -without touching: Big Tom, a whiz at ``controlling the distances that separate him from the other people''; and cool, pretty Mugsie, descending the stairs ``like a hawk on an air current.'' In letters to Tom (she hopes he'll help her get Shelby), Louise treats him to some family history--dry old men, pretty women in lives of duty and drab, and two suicides. Louise does spring Shelby (in a bitterly comic maneuver), and her advice to young Tom, characteristically stalled (Louise's estimate of him as ``a fool'' seems on target), is as cruel as truth as she sends him north ``to beat your brains out against a stone wall.'' A shriving family portrait gallery, both compassionate and ruthless. -- Copyright �1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Southern gothic touches lace this dark, portentous story of family lies revealed and grievances redressed. In Passion & Prejudice , Bingham described the bitter conflicts that beset several generations of her own family, which owned the Louisville Courier-Journal . She sets this, her second novel, in a small North Carolina town circa 1958. Louise, the elder of two middle-aged sisters, quietly cares for childlike Shelby, who suffers unpredictable seizures and emotional storms. Baffled and embarrassed by Louise's refusal to put Shelby in an institution, their beloved cousin Big Tom, a state senator, forces her hand. While casting about for ways to free Shelby, Louise tries mightily to strip emotional blinders from the eyes of Big Tom's tormented son, a Harvard sophomore heading for a nervous breakdown. Bingham's skills are intermittent: she is capable of communicating bone-deep truths, but spoils them through florid overwriting. Louise's letters to Young Tom tell of too many hushed-up family tragedies, teasing out a multigenerational skein of insanity. Throughout, Bingham harps on repellent sights and smells, evoking--then exaggerating--palpable decay beneath seemingly smooth surface appearances.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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