Cool's Ridge - Hardcover

Perrin, Ursula

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1877946680 ISBN 13: 9781877946684

Publisher: Permanent Pr Pub Co, 1996

Synopsis

When 25-year-old Liz Stillwell arrives at Cool's Ridge, a 'communal farm' in the Kittatiny Mountains of rural northwest New Jersey, she believes she has found a safe and peaceful place. As the sun sets, the eight yojng adults who share the farmhouse sit down to a supper of fresh garden vegetables and strawberries. But despite the country setting, an air of tension that is political as well as sexual, pervades the farm. It is June of 1972. There's a war on in Vietnam and all of the group members are anti-war activists.

Liz has come to Cool's Ridge in pursuit of her lover, the enigmatic Skip Loomis, She realizes that Skip is often emotionally distant but she puzzles over why. Is it, as Skip complains, because she's too intense? Or is their relationship clouded by its beginnings? Liz and Skip met on the Princeton campus, on the day when John Stillwell's roommate committed suicide. This appalling event seems to have triggered John's breakdown and his gradual and frightening descent into schizophrenia.

Liz's attachment to her sick brother and her attempts to protect him, create a shadowy area in her relations with her lover. While her father detaches himself from the family to begin a new life, Liz assumes increasing responsibility for Jon, The situation reaches a crisis one Fourth of July weekend when Skip's socially prominent parents arrive at that same time that John appears, AWOL from his hospital.

Detachment versus involvement, passion, and risk is a theme mirrored by the novel's other dominant character, Leonard Gannet. A member of the group and editor of their small weekly newspaper, he finds himself unwillingly attracted to Liz despite the fact that he is "locked into a marriage the way we're locked into the Vietnam war, by pride and deception." Leonard, Skip, and Liz, the others of the group (Shauna, Alice, Wayne, May, and Sal) are embarked on a wistful search for emotional and intellectual asylum in a nation that is violently divided on the meaning and necessity of the war in South-East Asia.

About this title

About the Author

URSULA PERRIN was born in Berlin, Germany, and grew up in Amsterdam, New York, and Ridgewood, Queens. After graduating from Smith College, she taught history at the Chapin School in New York City. The author of five previous novels, she is also an active environmentalist and co-founder of the Paulinskill-Pequest Watershed Association. She is married to Mark Perrin, MD., and is mother to Tom (a chef), Chris (a singer), and Nick, (a Presbyterian minister). The Perrins live in rural Northwest New Jersey and Gay's Island, Cushing, Maine.

Reviews

Pursuing themes and situations near to the heart of her five previous novels (The Looking-Glass Lover, 1989, etc.), Perrin here places a troubled young woman on an upstate New Jersey communal farm, where she must cope with an inadequate marriage--as well as with her severely dysfunctional family--before discovering who she is and what she really wants from life. It's the summer of '72 when love, or the idea of it, brings 25-year-old Liz Stillwell to the farm at Cool's Ridge. There, she reunites with the wealthy, elusive charmer Skip, with whom she's had an intermittent romance since college. But his ongoing aloofness and the group dynamics of the place--a tangle of confused relationships and a commitment to setting up a community newspaper, with Skip's backing--confound her. Meanwhile, her arrival at the farm coincides with her parents' divorce; Liz not only has to contend with emotional upheaval from that but also with the aftermath, as her father remarries and her mother becomes terminally ill, raising difficult questions as to who will care for her hopelessly schizophrenic, often institutionalized brother. Although she's attracted to the brooding, brainy Leonard, the paper's editor and husband of the beautiful Alice, who seems to have a thing for Skip, Liz turns to her old lover as a safe port in the storm, eventually marrying him. Their relationship barely improves, however, and when, shortly after her mother's death, brother John goes AWOL and comes to visit, quickly becoming a suspect when a neighbor is murdered, Liz has to leave the farm. Returning to her mother's house, she finally finds the support and tranquility she needs, within herself. Any writer pounding out the same thematic chords in successive works risks redundancy, but here the notes sounded seem to sink deeper in, giving characters a worn but comfortable feel, and their personalities a subtle, complex texture that comes from aging well. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

With its breezy insights and moments of unexpected humor, Perrin's sixth novel (after The Looking-Glass Lover, 1989) is most engaging when it focuses on Liz Stillwell's search for asylum from the sudden eruption of tragedy and discord in her upper-middle-class family. Less involving are the easily typed characters and the heroine's inexplicable romantic life. The novel opens in the summer of 1972, as narrator Liz, 25, arrives at Cool's Ridge, a communal farm in northwest N.J. that Skip Loomis, her longtime yet curiously detached lover, inhabits with six friends. Anti-war politics serve as little more than a colorful backdrop for the unfolding story; and after the early chapters, Perrin drops the hipster slang and nostalgic descriptions of period garb to concentrate on the mounting pressures that Liz faces as her parents divorce and her family is impoverished in an effort to get treatment for her schizophrenic brother. Inside the "family" at Cool's Ridge, Liz is equally stressed, confronting tensions arising from her anemic courtship and marriage to Skip and from her love-hate relationship with Leonard Gannet, a brooding, bearish man who acts like a countercultural Heathcliff (which man Liz winds up with is no surprise). Despite its energy and the deft plumbing of the unexpectedly bourgeois anxieties at Cool's Ridge, the novel loses its focus in a quagmire of improbable relationships and busy plot devices.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Permanent Pr Pub Co
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1877946680
• ISBN 13: 9781877946684
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 286