Passing On (First Edition)

Still dominated by the memories of her late mother, Helen looks back on their lives together, and wonders why only her younger sister, Louise, found the courage to leave and live an independent life

Greystones is a moldy, drafty house of no great distinction located in the equally nondescript English town of Spaxton. The domineering and cantankerous Dorothy Glover has finally passed away, leaving her middle-aged progeny, Helen and Edward, to examine their lives, both past and future. It's a subtle plot and one that does well with Lively's ( The Road to Lichfield ) gently assured style. By revealing developments through small details--the discarded dishrags that mark the beginning of a relationship and the glimpse of a watch that signals its end--she delicately delineates the impact of love, scandal and turmoil. On the rare occasion when Lively gives reign to sweeping statements, as when the dramatic Louise comments on motherhood ("At the moments you wish you were shot of the whole thing you know perfectly well that it's precisely because you couldn't endure to be without it, now you know about it, that you've got to go through all this"), her writing doesn't quite ring true. But such instances are rare in this consistently engrossing tale.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In Lively's eighth novel, the death of their domineering mother sends Helen, an unmarried 52-year-old part-time librarian, and her younger bachelor brother Edward, a schoolteacher, on introspective journeys. The finely wrought perceptions of individuals in inevitably skewed relationships that Lively drew in Pack of Cards (LJ 4/1/89) and her Booker Prize-winning novel, Moon Tiger ( LJ 3/15/88) are again in evidence. Years of repression and stasis in the moldering home in the Cotswolds now yield to the unfolding of an intense, private inner drama of memory and desire for both Helen and Edward. The novel subtly gathers force as these quite unpretentious but compelling characters experience crises and move from complacency to knowledge and a less-than-happy conclusion. Lively's great talent as a writer of adult fiction is reconfirmed.
- Susanna Bartmann Pathak, Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.