Sweet Water - Hardcover

Kramer, Kathryn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375400834 ISBN 13: 9780375400834

Publisher: Knopf, 1998

Synopsis

In her powerfully engrossing new novel, Kathryn Kramer (called by the New York Times "a storyteller to whom we willingly submit") explores the American way of love via two romantic triangles. One is taking place now (a skeptical horsewoman, a passionate biographer, an international financier) and the other a hundred years ago, at the same Vermont resort hotel.
As the plot unfolds, the secrets embedded in the two romances work their way to the surface: newly discovered love letters, addressed in the last century to an earlier proprietress of the hotel, a Miss Lucinda Dearborn, not only turn out to be from America's greatest expatriate novelist but also point to Lucinda's unsuspected lifelong affair with another man.
In the present, mysterious events that occurred the winter the current owners of the hotel, Ned and Greta Dene, met as teenagers, threaten to overwhelm their lives once again when Greta's first and greatest love disappears in a plane crash and the priest who brought about their meeting reappears, as if on cue.
As the story progresses, the distance between what happened in the past and what is happening now begins to close, and Lucinda Dearborn's amazing and ultimately tragic story illuminates Greta and Ned's summer of crisis.
Sweet Water is a spacious novel, rich in event and the feel of America--Civil War boys returning from the fighting, the hotel's famous water cures, a woman galloping her horse across the hills, a Catholic priest who presides over a miracle he doesn't believe in, an old-fashioned diviner who goes looking for water and turns up the letters that set everything in motion.
It is also a literary detective story, a brilliant and gripping novel about the ways in which love can be fueled or destroyed by secrets, about the distances between men and women, and about the extraordinary and unexpected ways in which faith between them is engendered.

About this title

About the Author

Kathryn Kramer is the author of two previous novels, A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space and Rattle-snake Farming. She teaches at Middle-
bury College in Vermont.

From the Inside Flap

fully engrossing new novel, Kathryn Kramer (called by the New York Times "a storyteller to whom we willingly submit") explores the American way of love via two romantic triangles. One is taking place now (a skeptical horsewoman, a passionate biographer, an international financier) and the other a hundred years ago, at the same Vermont resort hotel.<br>As the plot unfolds, the secrets embedded in the two romances work their way to the surface: newly discovered love letters, addressed in the last century to an earlier proprietress of the hotel, a Miss Lucinda Dearborn, not only turn out to be from America's greatest expatriate novelist but also point to Lucinda's unsuspected lifelong affair with another man.<br>In the present, mysterious events that occurred the winter the current owners of the hotel, Ned and Greta Dene, met as teenagers, threaten to overwhelm their lives once again when Greta's first and greatest love disappears in a plane crash and the priest who brought about their me

Reviews

A former resort hotel in the rolling hills of Vermont links past and present entanglements in this ambitious and richly imagined tale of romantic intrigue. For 15 years, the Hotel Thrush Hollow has been the summer home of Greta and Ned Dene, who now discover love letters written to former owner Lucinda Dearborn, a beautiful, self-styled faith healer who inherited the place from her father in the 1870s. Lucinda's admirer is none other than the celebrated expatriate novelist O. It falls to Ned, a biographer, to decide whether he should reveal the human side of a writer who's known for his icy reserve. In reality, O.'s prudish refusal to enter into a physical relationship with Lucinda propelled her into the arms of a married neighbor with whom she sustained a secret passion of long duration. While Ned puzzles over his subject, Greta mourns the death of her longtime lover, Lars Crain, and considers revealing to Ned that their son Henry was actually fathered by Lars. Intending to confess all, Greta invites Lars's widow to Thrush Hollow, but when Julia Crain divulges a shocking secret of her own, Greta changes her mind. Given the heady mix that's gone before?including arranged marriages, ecclesiastical scandals, stigmata and faith healings?the ending seems pedestrian: Ned remains clueless, Henry returns from camp, Julia and Greta bond. Yet Kramer (Rattlesnake Farming) is a gifted stylist; her vivid characters (especially the Henry James caricature O.) and evocative prose propel the reader through the complexities of two distinct yet connected plots. She breathes life into two passionate women whose lives, though separated by a century, are intriguingly mirrored.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Marital infidelity, religious mystery, and the ambiguities of both healing and guilt are intriguingly jumbled together in this ambitious third novel from Kramer (A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space, 1984; Rattlesnake Farming, 1992). In summary, the plot sounds more than a little unwieldy. Its major characters, Ned Dene (a historian and biographer) and his Danish-born wife Greta (a horse breeder), have purchased Thrush Hollow, a former Vermont resort hotelwhere their 21- year-marriage seems secure despite their temperamental differences and shared memory of a scandal involving Greta (who was, quite literally, stigmatized) and an offended bishop at the Catholic school where they had met as teenagers. Greta, furthermore, has never confessed to Ned that their son Henry was fathered by their late friend (and the love of her life), Lars Crain. Now, Ned's discovery of letters written a century earlier, by Thrush Hollow's then mistress Lucinda Dearborn, reveals a history of both illicit love and ``Passion unrealized that's akin to, and far grander than, the Denes' own spurious compatibility. And the sudden reappearance of people crucially involved in her several betrayals forces Greta to face the truth about her own confusion of loves, and understand that there are burdens she must shoulder alone. This is a very curious novel. Its use of water imagery (the art of dowsing, an inexplicable ``cure'' Lucinda Dearborn practices) is skillful and deeply suggestive. And the unfolding story of Lucinda and the famous novelist who tried, and failed, to return her lovewhich is obviously based on the relationship between Henry James and the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolsonintermittently possesses the haunting immediacy of folk ballad. Too many things are going here, and they don't all hang together, but Kramers best passages persuasively display her gift for meditative lyricism and energetic imagination. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In the cellar of their old Vermont house, once a resort hotel, Greta and Ned Dene discover a cache of late-nineteenth-century letters revealing a relationship between Lucinda Dearborn, the hotel's owner, and a famous expatriate writer called simply O. Greta has a secret of her own. She is mourning the death of Crain, her lover since before her marriage to Ned and, she believes, the father of her child. As the story progresses, more secrets are uncovered. Greta has not been open with Ned about an incident during her school days involving a clergyman who befriended them both, and Crain's widow has kept hidden a crucial fact about her marriage. The writer O. is clearly patterned after Henry James, and the way Kramer fashions her tale will remind many of James' style. As the story goes on, the links between all the various elements grow more apparent, but not all the pieces quite fit together. Those who are intrigued by the interweaving of past and present may also enjoy A. S. Byatt's Possession. Mary Ellen Quinn

Greta Dene, a professional horse trainer, is emotionally swamped by secrets old and new. Her ill-concealed grief over the death of her longtime lover has put her marriage in jeopardy. Her 14-year-old son's parentage similarly threatens her fragile ties to her hapless husband. And her frightening past is literally knocking at the door. But Greta's messy love triangle parallels another. The Denes occupy Thrush Hollow, a former resort hotel in Vermont, run in the 1870s by one Lucinda Dearborn. The Denes uncover a cache of letters written by an unnamed famous expatriate American writer (Henry James, perhaps?), which hint at his jealousy of a suspected rival for Miss Dearborn's affections. Dickensian coincidences abound in Kramer's (Rattlesnake Farming, LJ 10/15/92) tangled tale. Readers who question prickly Greta's appeal to the people in her life will find themselves compelled to keep turning pages for the answer. A good book-discussion choice.?Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375400834
• ISBN 13: 9780375400834
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 307