Jamesland - Hardcover

Huneven, Michelle

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375413820 ISBN 13: 9780375413827

Publisher: Knopf, 2003

Synopsis

How do people live in this world? is a question that seems to hover, alongside the Hollywood sign, over the neighborhood of Los Feliz. Certainly Pete Ross wonders as much, his run as a successful chef, husband, and father having imploded so spectacularly as to land him back in the fraught care of his mother. Similarly, Alice Black’s life–hinging as it does on a married boyfriend–is yet pending, and Helen Harland’s ministry has thus far failed to enchant her new congregants. Meanwhile, at the retirement home down the street, Alice’s aunt Kate lives in a world whose most vivid presence is her distinguished ancestor William James.

Each of them, then, is trying to divine who or what is both missing and essential. They encounter one another–and several significant others besides–at Helen’s midweek service, and amidst the quotidian tumult their particular desires gradually dovetail in a quest not just for romance and friendship but also for deeper meaning in what one of them calls “the variety show of religious experience.”

Hilarious, surprising, and powerfully engaging, Jamesland displays Michelle Huneven’s subtle understanding of our steadfast hopes and irregular impulses, a humane comedy she shapes with–as the Los Angeles Times wrote of her first novel–“moral nerve, sharp wit, and uncommon generosity.”



Michelle Huneven received a Whiting Writers’ Award in 2002, and has also won a GE Younger Writers Award in Fiction and a James Beard Award. She is presently a restaurant reviewer for the LA Weekly. Her first novel, Round Rock, was named a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. She lives in Altadena, California.

About this title

About the Author

Michelle Huneven received a Whiting Writers’ Award in 2002, and has also won a GE Younger Writers Award in Fiction and a James Beard Award. She is presently a restaurant reviewer for the LA Weekly. Her first novel, Round Rock, was named a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. She lives in Altadena, California.

From the Back Cover

"Michelle Huneven is a writer of extraordinary and thrilling talent, and Jamesland is a marvel."
--Richard Russo  

"Jamesland is a blessing of a book. Michelle Huneven proves again that forgiveness has a wisdom of its own, and that real joy can grow in the compost of failure and frailties. Huneven’s characters embrace each other in all their brokenhearted striving; they renew our buried hope that we all may be loved as life finds us–imperfect, lost, blameworthy, full of good intentions. The compassion in this book is a rare and welcome gift. Gracefully written, shrewd in its observations, precise in its generosity, Jamesland is a wonderful book."
--Anne Michaels

“Huneven brings to the page a fiery intelligence . . . With its wry, generous take on human nature, this is, ultimately, a deeply moving novel.”
-–Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist

"A great L.A. novel . . . One of the goals of the novel since the beginning of the form has been to realistically capture love, that ever-flitting butterfly, in its contemporary incarnation. Huneven is one of our few writers who can deliver an authentic love story, with characters as unlikely for redemption as possible, as failed and weird and hopeless as ourselves. She somehow nudges them into relationships that change the feeling of everything."
--Mona Simpson, LA Weekly
"Engrossing . . . offbeat and vigorously written."
--Jennifer Egan, The New York Times Book Review
"Joyous . . . the best thing for the blues since lithium . . . Huneven writes lovingly and well . . . Squeaking, squelching, sloshing, the hearts of Huneven's characters beat a shaky rhythm, beside which a reader's own can't help thumping along. Like Anne Tyler, whom readers found long before the prize-givers ever did--or like the foxglove, which was soothing hearts centuries before apothecaries ever pestled it into tablets--Jamesland is good for what ails you."
--David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle
"Jamesland meanders agreeably . . . Another charmer from a gifted and very likeable writer."
--Kirkus Reviews
"Irresistable . . . This divine comedy offers a glimpse of transcendence that's refreshingly believable."
--Elizabeth Judd, Atlantic Monthly
"A delicate tale of personalities and longing."
--Katie Schneider, The Oregonian
“Huneven has assembled one-of-a-kind characters attempting to make their way in an uncertain world along paths of their own choosing."
--Maude McDaniel, Bookpage
"Huneven brings to the page a fiery intelligence . . . With its wry, generous take on human nature, this is, ultimately, a deeply moving novel.”
--Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist

From the Inside Flap

<i>How do people live in this world? </i>is a question that seems to hover, alongside the Hollywood sign, over the neighborhood of Los Feliz. Certainly Pete Ross wonders as much, his run as a successful chef, husband, and father having imploded so spectacularly as to land him back in the fraught care of his mother. Similarly, Alice Black’s life–hinging as it does on a married boyfriend–is yet pending, and Helen Harland’s ministry has thus far failed to enchant her new congregants. Meanwhile, at the retirement home down the street, Alice’s aunt Kate lives in a world whose most vivid presence is her distinguished ancestor William James.<br><br>Each of them, then, is trying to divine who or what is both missing and essential. They encounter one another–and several significant others besides–at Helen’s midweek service, and amidst the quotidian tumult their particular desires gradually dovetail in a quest not just for romance and friendship but also for deeper meaning in what one of them calls “the variety show of religious experience.”<br><br>Hilarious, surprising, and powerfully engaging, <b>Jamesland</b> displays Michelle Huneven’s subtle understanding of our steadfast hopes and irregular impulses, a humane comedy she shapes with–as the <i>Los Angeles Times</i> wrote of her first novel–“moral nerve, sharp wit, and uncommon generosity.”<br><br><br><br>Michelle Huneven received a Whiting Writers’ Award in 2002, and has also won a GE Younger Writers Award in Fiction and a James Beard Award. She is presently a restaurant reviewer for the <i>LA Weekly</i>. Her first novel, <i>Round Rock,</i> was named a <i>New York Times</i> Notable Book and a <i>Los Angeles Times</i> Best Book of the Year. She lives in Altadena, California.

Reviews

Like her critically acclaimed Round Rock, Huneven's sophomore effort explores a tightly knit community of troubled eccentrics. In the Los Angeles neighborhood of Los Feliz, a motley handful of residents attends Helen Harland's casual and inclusive services at the local Unitarian church. Helen-who can't interest her boyfriend in her preaching profession, and who battles the church board over matters such as men holding hands in the sanctuary-has her own struggles with faith, yet finds herself inspiring it in some of Los Feliz's other lonely souls. There's Alice Black, hot off a string of bad love affairs (including one with the husband of a local movie star) and living in a house belonging to her great-aunt Kate. The intermittently lucid Kate, now ensconced in a rest home, is still pursuing a life-long writing project related to her illustrious ancestor, the philosopher William James. And then there's crazy Pete Ross, a failed husband, father and chef now living with his mother, a nun, as part of his therapy. Spunky Helen maneuvers dinners and other get-togethers where people seemingly at odds grow (warmly and predictably) to know and love one another. More intelligent and quirky than the usual melodrama, this novel succeeds in exploring the slow and halting journey to self-acceptance. But this level of realism also becomes problematic: the narrative is slow-going, and the author's fondness for flashbacks further decelerates the plot. The theological conversations and the extensive information about William James may also be a turn-off for some readers. For those who are patient, however, this is a gentle, well-turned story of the search for redemption.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

*Starred Review* Shambling, disheveled Pete Ross is haunted by a question: "How do people live in this world?" Once a successful restaurateur with a loving wife and child, his world imploded after his restaurant failed; he has recently been released into his mother's care after an extended stay in a psychiatric facility. Bartender Alice Black, long on the run from her storied heritage as a descendent of William James, is entangled in a dead-end relationship with a married man. Both Pete and Alice find themselves attending the church services of new minister Helen Harland, who is refreshingly down-to-earth but also depressed by her hidebound parishioners' resistance to her new programming ideas. The three enter into a most unlikely friendship centered on Pete's mouthwatering meals and their scintillating, hilarious discussions about, well, how people live in this world. In some small measure, the friendship helps each of them to move ahead and to throw off restrictions imposed by fear, confusion, or pride. In her second novel, following Round Rock (1997), Huneven brings to the page a fiery intelligence about a whole host of topics, including dream psychology and gourmet cooking. With its wry, generous take on human nature, this is, ultimately, a deeply moving novel. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

Alice lived in her great-aunt's large bungalow on Wren Street in a desirable neighborhood known as Los Feliz. A hundred and fifty years before, Corporal Jose Vicente Feliz was awarded a Spanish land grant for his role in civilizing the unruly new pueblo of Los Angeles. Rancho Los Feliz--or the Happy Farm as it was often called--was a small, wealthy fiefdom with two thousand acres of mountainous wooded terrain teeming with game, a thousand more in flat arable fields and pastureland, and several miles of riverbed. Corporal Feliz enjoyed this windfall for eight short years. His savvy widow, Dona Verdugo, remarried and held on for decades, establishing legal title to the land once Mexico gained independence from Spain. Her heirs were less tenacious; several daughters sold their holdings at a dollar per acre, and the primary heir, Antonio, bequeathed his major holding to the family lawyer.

Today, the mountainous area is more or less intact as Griffith Park, but the rest of the Happy Farm went the way of most Southland ranchos: subdivided again and again into residential home sites.

In 1919, an Arts and Crafts architect built half a dozen homes in the lower hills of the district. 432 Wren Street was a four-bedroom, three-bath bungalow set deep in a double lot; its selling points included river stone and clinker brick masonry, teak wainscoting sanded to a skinlike smoothness, cedar-lined closets, large porches--one of them for sleeping--and a two-car garage. The kitchen was unusually, gloriously large--the architect's mother talked him into this as well as a potting shed and wood-lath greenhouse. 432 sold to a prosperous young couple from Milwaukee, who raised three children there before selling it in 1946 to Alice Black's great-aunt.

When Aunt Kate made her offer on the house, there was consternation at the bank. Here was a single twenty-five-year-old woman from San Francisco intending to live alone in a family-sized residence at a time when there was an acute housing shortage for returning GIs. Thousands of these GIs, in fact, were living with their wives and young children not two miles from Wren Street in tin-roofed Quonset huts in Griffith Park. Still, if the truth be told, few if any of the families could afford the Wren Street house, and Kate Gordon could; she had both an independent income and a teaching position, so ultimately the bank had no good reason to turn her down.

Kate did not live alone for long. No sooner had she filled the rooms with furniture than she drove up to Palo Alto, sprang her older brother Walter from a private sanitarium and brought him south to live with her.

Some years before, in his mid-twenties, newly married and teaching political philosophy at Berkeley, Walter Gordon lost his ability to think clearly or tend to himself in a responsible manner. The diagnosis was dementia praecox. Though his parents tried caring for him, he exhausted them with his wild talk until, in the end, they had to institutionalize him. By the time Kate signed his release, he'd found an outlet for his most insistent energies in gardening and happily transferred his talents to Wren Street, turning the prosaic lawn and barbered shrubbery into a densely wooded private botanical garden.

Except for short stints back at the sanitarium for "stabilization," or when Kate went traveling, he lived with his sister for forty years. Walter remained tractable and pleasant, so long as he took his medication. He was well into his sixties when he started sinking into what Kate called his "hibernations," dozing for days on end in his Barcalounger and rousing himself only as physical needs dictated. When he stopped getting up to go to the bathroom, Kate had to put him in the VA home. Now eighty, Walter had been fully catatonic for years.

Kate herself retired from teaching at seventy-one, determined to finish a book she'd been writing since college, a novel based on the marriage and family life of her grandfather, the psychologist and philosopher William James. Without a job or brother to structure her days, Kate relaxed her personal habits. She ordered in groceries, lived on toast and tea, spent weeks on end in her bathrobe. The day Alice Black arrived at Wren Street, intending to stay for a semester, her great-aunt was napping at her desk amid perilous stacks of books, manuscript pages and jam-daubed, crumb-encrusted plates.

Alice was twenty-nine years old then, and had just shed both job and lover. (Her boyfriend, who was also her boss at the Riverine Ecology Project, had taken up with the other assistant.) Alice first drove to her parents' home in Lime Cove, a small farm town at the foot of the Sierras, where for two days she lay on her narrow childhood bed, surrounded by boxes of old bank statements, and contemplated her next move.

Before the Riverine Ecology Project, Alice had spent several years as a medical technician in doctors' offices, but she'd had enough of bodily fluids. In college, she'd taken a creative writing class and the instructor, after reading her memoir "The Jewish Farmer's Daughter," had declared hers a talent worth developing--though he might've been unduly impressed that she was distantly related to Henry James, a fact alluded to in the memoir. Or, since Alice ended up sleeping with him, his praise might have been a come-on by someone keen to sleep with a distant relative of the author of The Golden Bowl. (Alice was, in fact, the great-great-granddaughter of Henry's brother William.) At any rate, she had thought often of taking another writing course--nonfiction--on the off chance that a talent did exist. The time, it seemed, was nigh.

She cleaned out her bank account (three hundred dollars and change), added her paltry household goods and microscope to the clutter in her former bedroom, then drove her nine-year-old Toyota Corolla to Los Angeles.

Throughout her childhood, until she went to college, Alice had spent two months each summer with Aunt Kate at the Wren Street house. Her mother, fearing that Alice might become some coarse-mannered rustic, had prevailed upon this favorite aunt to take the girl in hand. Alice had her own suite in the back of the house, which she continued to use throughout her twenties, when she came to town for a biology conference or rock concert or just a weekend visit with Aunt Kate.

This time, however, Aunt Kate, roused from her nap, welcomed her strangely--"Come in, come in. Where's William?"--as if Alice were Alice Gibbens James, wife to their famous ancestor. This lapse was the first of countless, as Aunt Kate was going without sleep for twenty-five or thirty hours at a time. Deep in these binges, she was manic, incoherent and impossible to reach--back there at the turn of the century with the James family. Even when well rested and articulate, she reflexively steered all subjects back to these relatives, many of whom had the same names. Alices, Henrys and Kates were especially plentiful: William James's wife, sister and daughter-in-law were each an Alice, and a sleep-deprived Aunt Kate might address her niece as any one of them--and Alice Black eventually got the hang of knowing which one.

Once settled in her Wren Street bedroom, she enrolled in a ten-week class called "Getting Started in Creative Nonfiction." The instructor, a woman this time, read and admired "The Jewish Farmer's Daughter" and suggested Alice expand it into a book-length manuscript. After numerous attempts, Alice determined that she'd exhausted her interest with the original eight pages. Her class assignments were also praised (as were everyone else's), but writing them had exposed her to a painful shortfall of ideas, the slipperiness of language and tedious, often fruitless hours at a desk: for all that drudgery, she might as well be back in a lab. Moreover, living with Aunt Kate would temper anybody's literary ambitions. Who's to say that Alice herself wouldn't wind up obsessed to the point of madness, and still be unpublished.

Alice did, however, meet a man in the class, Spiro, a stand-up comedian and by far the best writer there. Coming in one night after a date, she found Aunt Kate on the floor of her study, cold and white with shock. She'd fallen asleep in her chair and slid to the floor, breaking both a hip and a leg.

After surgeries, Aunt Kate was sent to the nearby Beverly Manor Rest Home. With her meals and sleeping regimented, her mental state improved; she could surface and converse with much of her preretirement clarity, although all subjects still led to William James et familias. The doctor pronounced this monomania mild, harmless and to some extent age-appropriate, and said she could go home as soon as she could walk again.

Alice's writing course ended and she didn't sign up for another. "I thought I wanted to quit biology and write," she told Spiro, "but maybe I only wanted to quit biology." She stayed at Wren Street ostensibly to assist in her aunt's imminent return. Otherwise Alice's plans for the future were vague. She hoped to move in with Spiro, and maybe go for a master's in field biology--animal behavior or wildlife management, something far from test tubes. In the meantime, being broke, she took a part-time bartending job at the Fountain, a dark, fusty, intermittently hip and increasingly gay cocktail lounge just around the corner from the Beverly Manor.

Four years later, she was still the lone resident at 432 Wren Street and pouring drinks at the Fountain. (Things hadn't worked with Spiro or his successor, a junior college art teacher, but her yearlong affair with Nick Lawton seemed to be reaching a critical juncture.) And Aunt Kate was still at the Beverly Manor, her bones having not knit sufficiently.

Therefore, when Alice awoke one morning and remembered seeing both a deer and her great-aunt in the Wren Street dining room, she dismissed it as a dream.



2

Sore in her lower back and shoulders, Alice padded, blinking, into the kitchen, where the many windows revealed the pink s...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375413820
• ISBN 13: 9780375413827
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400