Synopsis
Tom Styll's wife, Constance, has left him for reasons he can't fathom. She has run off to a lakeside cabin with their infant son and her father, and Tom has hired a mysterious lawyer named Margaret Fowler to discuss the possibilities of divorce.His wife Constance writes him tender epistles urging him to vow continence -- to be sexually indifferent as a fish, as she herself has vowed. She suggests that he think of her as Heloise to his Abelard, a lifestyle her provocative temper has never suggested.
It is strangely enough Tom's attempts to understand the various poses of Margaret Fowler, his lawyer that leads him, not only to the heart of his lost wife, but to the substance of his own heart.
Set in Kalamzoo, Michigan, "Styll In Love" is a moving tale of lost love and unexpected joy. Rich in subtlety it asks us: What is gained by loss?
Reviews
A first novel that strains for profundity as a young husband explores the meaning of love and death after his wife flees to the Canadian woods. Though set in Kalamazoo, Michigan, as down-to-earth a place as is likely to be found, Schultz's tale, often rendered in long, lyrical riffs, is only lightly tethered to the real world. Myths, religious beliefs, and moments of magic realisma talking pigeon offers advice and commentdrive the most significant elements of the story, which begins when Tom Styll's wife, Constance, flees with their baby son, Teddy, to live in the north woods with her father, Ned Gasper. Constance, like her father, is obsessed with the deteriorating environment, the death of civilization, and all the apocalyptic worries that impel similarly sensitive folk to live in heatless cabins with outdoor privies. Poor Tom, a former civil engineer who once dreamed of building biospheres on the moon and is now reduced to writing instruction manuals, is still recovering from the death of his parents in an airplane crash. He loves Constance, who reads philosophy for solace, but he's also of a more optimistic temperament, finding consolation in work, golf, and friends. Constance, meanwhile, shows no signs of returning, and soat the pigeon's suggestionTom reluctantly consults the mysterious and unmarried Maggie Fowler, an attractive if eccentric attorney with six children of differing paternities. Tom receives lots of other and varying counsel from friends and his brothers (one is a priest at the Vatican, the other a geologist), but Maggie's advice carries the most weight. She finally persuades the still troubled Tom, after many deep talks and a near-seduction, to ride off into the sunset with her on a visit to a mythical place where all will be made clear. An ambitious but muddled tale that tries but fails to create a convincingly modern myth of redemption. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Better titled "In Love with Style," this debut is bedeviled from its first sentence by prose so overwrought, self-conscious and clumsy that it smothers all but the rudiments of plot and character. Abandoned by his young wife, Constance, and their infant son, the emotionally anesthetized Styll embarks on an anatomy of love, which he identifies with death. His narcissistic project is threatened when he falls in love with the lawyer (a moonlighting witch with a talking pigeon) whom he hires in the battle for custody of his son. The banal and fantastic intermingle as Styll and his earth-mother savior?a feminist of indeterminate age and predictably well-preserved good looks?consummate their love and, leaving behind all worldly encumbrances (kid included), head off into the sunset. It would be bad enough if Schultz's narrator were the only one addicted to symbols, portents and cliches, but his characters all speak the same dialect, a mishmash of New Age pieties dressed up in nonsense. The author should be cautioned that style alone does not a novel make. (May) FYI: Styll in Love is Van Neste's inaugural publication; a second book will follow in September. The press was started by Karen Van Neste Owen, the wife of novelist Howard Owen.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
