The Truth of the Matter

Widowed years before by her husband Warren+s early death in an icy morning car crash, Agnes Scofield has grown into a woman of fierce and unconquerable independence. It is the 1940s in Washburn, Ohio, and the war has finally ended. Agnes+s children are returning home-from Washington, D.C., from soldiering abroad-and bringing an end to Agnes+s solitude in the great old family house. And to Agnes this means that she must accustom herself once more to her children+s presence, to their notions of what kind of mother she has been for all these years. Hanging over the day-to-day events of life at Scofields are Agnes+s constant memories of Warren, her feelings of devotion and resentment, and her longtime suspicion that his untimely departure may not have been an accident.In this meditative novel of love and trust, lust and deception, Dew illuminates the small events that make up a lifetime. She is a marvel of a writer, and her spare and precise prose builds a world of startlingly lush and vivid detail.

Robb Forman Dew is the author of four novels, including Dale Loves Sophie to Death, for which she received a National Book Award. But The Truth of the Matter, the second installment in her trilogy about the Scofields of Washburn, Ohio, is more than a novel; it's an act of profound nurturing. To enter this book is to be fully received into a collective history, gauzily familiar from a distance, stunningly revelatory at close range.

The Evidence Against Her, the first book in the trilogy, chronicled the intersecting lives of a great number of characters from the 1880s through the 1920s. The Truth of the Matter concerns itself with just a few years in the middle of the 20th century, when Agnes Claytor Scofield is in mid-life.

Widowed at 30, Agnes has raised four children, found much-needed work as a school teacher and taken seriously her stewardship of the impressive, difficult-to-maintain family house. When World War II calls each of her barely grown children away, Agnes finds herself alone for the first time.

Agnes offsets the "unnerving sense of being a tourist in her own home" by engaging in a companionable, gratifyingly physical relationship with Will Dameron, a widower and old friend from childhood. Chief among the rich rewards of this novel is Dew's depiction of Agnes's sexuality. Her capacity for physical pleasure serves as the one enduring solace in her life. During her early marriage to the charismatic but troubled Warren Scofield, Agnes had found herself "helpless against the heat that climbed her throat and turned her face a blotchy red. She would duck her head in an effort to become invisible, flushed as she was with the idea of sex." Surveying the family dinner table, she might look at her husband and wonder, "What are we doing . . . wasting our time with lamb chops. Bothering with lima beans, with a plate of cake?" But Agnes's grown children, Dew writes, think of her as a woman "lacking any hint of underlying sensuality," with her "low-to-the-ground practicality, her determined frugality, the little snap of satisfaction with the dailiness of her life. . . . They were enthusiasts; she was a skeptic; they were very nearly greedy in their anticipation of the future, whereas she seemed no more than resigned to it."

This discrepancy between one's essential self and one's public persona is a theme Dew carries over from The Evidence Against Her. The way in which it gets dramatized in The Truth of the Matter, though, is particularly painful. The reader is cast as the sole reliable witness to the luxuriant heart of the middle-aged Agnes. When Will asks her to marry him, she tells him he's "making something romantic out of . . . Just out of circumstances... It would be like getting married because we dance well together!"

Will counters her refusal by reasoning that she must be in love with him because "no woman in the world can enjoy herself so much in bed and not be in love." But Agnes knows that the "most seductive aspect of seeing Will -- the marvel of the sex between them in the face of a long-standing and dispassionate friendship -- was that no one knew about it. . . . The constant risk of being discovered and disapproved of -- that was all that came between her and the hopeless feeling of inconsequence."

The schism between the public and private self is echoed in Dew's depiction of the past. The whole coursing sweep of the agreed-upon history of a country or a family or even an individual is repeatedly juxtaposed with the very smallest of its component parts -- the isolated moment. It is one of the book's achievements that its narrator can dolly back and forth seamlessly from the panoramic to the intimate. This allows for an artful rendering of the misperceptions and misinformation that roil the Scofield family and cause so much unhappiness.

While the plot of the novel follows the marriages and births of the next generation of Scofields (trailing mysteries of paternity and identity), the real story here is Agnes's evolution. The novel opens with Agnes as a young, happily married woman incapable of comprehending what her husband means when he says, "Our whole lives are really just an effort to fulfill a sort of quest of that essential self. . . . But it does take a lot of strategy. . . . Living is a lot more tiring than people realize when they begin it." As the sorrow and guilt over the circumstances surrounding her husband's death catch up with her, the ingeniously complex Agnes becomes acquainted not only with the fatigue of living but also with her remarkable, essential self.

Reviewed by Rachel Basch
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

An old-fashioned novel in the best sense, The Truth of the Matter follows the evolution of a complex woman from wife and mother to independence in the 1940s. Elaborate family ties, centered on Agnes's familiar emotions and changing relationships with her children, form the heart of the novel. But Truth also convincingly juxtaposes the minutiae of daily life against a panorama of wartime America. The novel's unhurried plot concerned a few critics, who cited the first half as limp. Other reviewers compared Agnes's rich characterization to her more stiffly portrayed children. Either way, critics look forward to the third installment of the Scofield family saga.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Starred Review. Dew returns to the Scofields of Washburn, Ohio, for a minutely observed, lucid and lyrical examination of family ties, the second in a trilogy (The Evidence Against Her). By the early days of WWII, widow Agnes Scofield (her husband, Warren, died in a car accident in 1930) has raised four children. Financially pressed and emotionally repressed, Agnes has learned to rely on her schoolteacher's salary, her lifelong friends Lily and Robert Butler, and her ability to keep her thoughts to herself. The Scofield household is first disrupted when the now adult children leave to join the war effort, and then again when they return with spouses, children and ideas of their own. Dew details inner turmoil with delicacy, wit and precision; she focuses on life's ordinary moments, studying them from various points of view and revealing layers of feeling. A Fourth of July picnic gets rehashed by town gossips; family myths are traced to their unlikely origins. As Washburn's postwar expansion casts the Scofield home into shabby respectability, the Scofields likewise change with the times, and Agnes returns to the Maine vacation house of the first novel to come to terms with truths she has spent a lifetime avoiding, in a moving yet unsentimental culmination to a remarkable personal journey. (Nov.)
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As the widow of the prominent Warren Scofield, Agnes and her children are the closest thing to royalty her small Ohio town has. The well-loved Warren (who secretly suffered from a bipolar disorder) died years ago in a mysterious car accident. Since then, Agnes has lived for her children and to protect their memories of their father. As her children grow up, Agnes finds herself at a crossroads, unsure of who she is and how her life should be lived. It's possible that praise and criticism of this novel could be the same phrase: "It's very realistic." Nothing much happens in the small town, or in Agnes' life. Her children grow up and move out. World War II intrudes in their lives^B in minor ways. Mysterious family secrets are hinted at and then dropped. Even the marriage of Agnes' daughter to a former lover of Agnes' does little to disturb the cozy world. A gentle, soothing read that manages to be moving in its stillness. Marta Segal
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