O My Darling: A Novel - Hardcover

Gaige, Amity

2.93

370 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1590511743 ISBN 13: 9781590511749

Publisher: Other Press, 2005

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O My Darling tells the story of a devoted young couple whose marriage begins to implode when they move into their first house. The external lives of Clark, a high school guidance counselor, and Charlotte, a bookkeeper, are utterly ordinary, but their interior lives are as bold and complex as abstract paintings colored by imagined possibilities, childhood joys and, more darkly, by deeply buried fears. When Clark rescues a young boy from drowning, a chain of events—some comic, some harrowing—is set in motion, revealing the fault lines of the couple's marriage and individual psyches.

Amity Gaige is a consummate stylist. Her every sentence contains a tiny world—marrying striking images to deep, soulful ideas in perfectly concise fashion. Her cool, slightly off-kilter sensibility expressed in spare, lucid prose will remind readers of Paula Fox (Desperate Characters), while her pure, hyper-real vision of suburban America places her among the most talented of the generation of writers dubbed "the children of Cheever."

"Given its level of sophistication and off-center wit, it's a bit startling to realize that O My Darling is Amity Gaige's first novel. The characters, beautifully drawn, are as unsentimental toward one another as their author is toward them and yet, wonderfully, this novel with its many ambushes of lyrical moments, is deeply felt."
-Stuart Dybek, author of I Sailed with Magellanand The Coast of Chicago

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About the Author:

Amity Gaige is a graduate of Brown University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. She is the author of the acclaimed novel O My Darling, chosen by the National Book Foundation for its "5 Under 35" program to recognize the achievements of five first-time fiction writers each year. She teaches creative writing at Mount Holyoke College and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. Visit her website at www.amitygaige.com.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. Crystalline insights into the nature of love and flashes of narrative brilliance buoy a plot-deficient first novel about the strains of a young marriage. Clark and Charlotte have just moved into their first house, which is still inhabited by ghosts of other marriages. Isolated in their suburb, Charlotte nervously jokes, "[W]e live in a little diorama or something. Help, help! Let us out!" Clark is mourning the freedom of imagination that seems to have perished with his mother's recent suicide. Dead-on dialogue (" 'You're alive!' she cried. 'You jackass!' ") and moments of suburban absurdity (a public joyride on a lawn mower; the curious arrival of a nude travel magazine in the mailbox) impart the acute delight more often found in short stories. While the horror-story elements (disembodied voices; visible spirits) don't add up to much and the themes of apology and forgiveness don't fully edify, gorgeous snippets on love and marriage ("Marriage is the only punishment great enough to fit the crime of love") compensate. Gaige's precise wordplay, sharp dialogue and bite-sized themes might be better served in story form, but her novel often sparkles and delights. (May)
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