Five Fortunes: A Novel - Hardcover

Gutcheon, Beth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060176792 ISBN 13: 9780060176792

Publisher: William Morrow, 1998

Synopsis

"She has absolutely perfect pitch when it comes to capturing the voices of these remarkable women. This seems to me to be the quintessential American woman's tale. I loved it."

-- Anne Rivers Siddons

Five Fortunes, the funny and hope-filled new novel from acclaimed author Beth Gutcheon, is about a year in the life of five remarkable women, each of whom saves her own life by trying to do the right thing for somebody else.

Rae Strouse is a lively octogenarian with an ailing husband. Carter Bond is a private investigator trying to give up smoking. Amy and Jill Burrows are a mother and teenage daughter traveling together, bearing a secret weight of baggage between them. Laura Lopez, reeling from the death of her politician husband, needs a new set of dreams. They are about to meet at a fabled health spa called The Cloisters, known affectionately to its devotees as Fat Chance.

Gutcheon weaves a large-hearted tale of five vivid and memorable women who know where they've been but have no idea where they're going. In the luxury boot-camp atmosphere of The Cloisters, where doctors, lawyers, spoiled housewives, movie stars and captains of industry are stripped of makeup and jewelry and the other social markers that keep people from really seeing each other, surprising friendships can be made, with surprising consequences.

In this year of their lives, these five women learn that it is both true and untrue that we make our own luck. Though the worlds they inhabit are as real as tomorrow's newspaper stories, constantly reminding them how closely linked are rich and poor, fortune and misfortune, there is also a magic to the tale that causes it to resonate long after the book is finished. Beth Gutcheon is the critically acclaimed author of four novels, The New Girls, Still Missing, Domestic Pleasures and Saying Grace. She is the writer of several film scripts, including the Academy Award nominee The Children of Theatre Street. She lives in New York City.

About this title

About the Author

Beth Gutcheon is the critically acclaimed author of the novels, The New Girls, Still Missing, Domestic Pleasures, Saying Grace, Five Fortunes, More Than You Know, Leeway Cottage, and Good-bye and Amen. She is the writer of several film scripts, including the Academy-Award nominee The Children of Theatre Street. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

Gutcheon's style is clean, literate, funny and mostly unsentimental. She brings to mind Armistead Maupin in the wry understatement of her prose, her broad canvas and the intelligence with which she attacks substantial issues. I was unable to put Five Fortunes down....

Friends, lovers, adulterers, a fortune-teller and even a murderer are objects of gently sardonic fun in Gutcheon's stylish new comedy (after Saying Grace) about five women who meet at The Cloisters, a posh $4000-a-week health spa in Arizona. Octogenarian Rae Strouse, a former fan-dancer and now a wealthy San Francisco matron, returns for her 22nd visit. A birthday gift for outsized (six feet and 180 lbs.) L.A. PI Carter Bond allows her a week in the hallowed hot tubs. Amy Burrows and her obese teenage daughter, Jill, come tangled in dirty laundry from their privileged Manhattan life, while anomalous, athletic Idahoan Laurie Lopez comes to grieve over the death of her husband, a politician and once a tennis star. "Fat Chance" is an apt nickname for this temple of rejuvenation: most of the guests haven't a prayer of living up to the example of their enthusiastic, neon-clad fitness instructors?one of whom is so thin "her body looked like a collection of bicycle parts." At the end of their frog march through the fat farm's regimen, the women meet in secret with a mysterious palm-reading masseuse, whose predictions will follow them long after they have completed their tour of duty at The Cloisters; by then, we are as caught up in this fast-paced story as these women are in each other's lives. UK, translation and serial rights: Wendy Weil.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gutcheon, veteran chronicler of the moneyed but miserable set (Saying Grace, 1995, etc.), takes five women and turns the friendship they make at a spa into an upbeat tale of love, redemption, and purpose helped along by money and powerful contacts. The five women, all with problems or heartaches, meet at the Cloisters, a fashionable health resort in the Arizona desert where the rich and famous come to lose weight, stop smoking, or relax. The women include chipper octogenarian Rae Strouse, who has lots of bucks but whose husband Albie, at home in the family manse in San Francisco, is failing fast. Lonely college student Jill, who looks like a blimp since she started eating as a way of coping with being raped in Central Park, is there with mother Amy, a woman who, the resident palm reader suggests, has rare abilities and will soon remarrya bit of a surprise, since she is currently married to Noah, a New York surgeon. Lanky Carter Bond, divorced and a Los Angeles private investigator, wants to stop smoking, and Laura Lopez, a judge, mother of five, and recent widow, just wants to grieve. Inevitably, the women are drawn to one another, and once they leave the spa keep in touch. In the year that follows, Jill, who experienced an affirming epiphany, loses weight, deals with another attack, and makes new friends; Rae, heartbroken after Albie dies, finds a new purpose in life when she starts building a housing project; a drug bust that went wrong brings not only baby Flora into Carter's life but also former husband Jerry; Laura, back home in Idaho, runs for the Senate, at her friends' urging; and, when Amy sees Noah with another woman, she moves out and focuses her considerable talents on running Laura's campaign. An unpretentious tale of friendship among the well-heeled that is both a page-turner and day-brightener. (Literary Guild alternate selection) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The importance of connections between women is highlighted in this story of friendship and support among a group of five women who first meet on a week-long retreat at a health spa in Arizona. As they help each other through the rigors of healthful living imposed on them by trainers and nutritionists, they develop strong mutual support on other levels as well. During the following year, these strong, independent, and ambitious women face enormous challenges that bring them even closer: private detective Carter quits smoking and takes on drug dealers in L.A.; the still vibrant Rae must face her husband's decline from Alzheimer's disease; Amy and her daughter, Jill, resolve old issues; and the recently widowed Laura declares her candidacy for the U.S. Senate. The friends discover that through finding ways to support one another, each is able to move toward healing and growth in her own life. Gutcheon is the author of four previous novels and the Academy Award^-nominated film script The Children of Theatre Street. Grace Fill

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060176792
• ISBN 13: 9780060176792
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416