The Short History of a Prince : A Novel - Hardcover

Hamilton, Jane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679457550 ISBN 13: 9780679457558

Publisher: Random House, 1998

Synopsis

"Jane Hamilton has removed all doubt that she belongs among the major writers of our time."  
--San Francisco Chronicle

Set in Jane Hamilton's signature Midwest, The Short History of a Prince is the story of Walter McCloud and his ambition to become a great ballet dancer. With compassion and humor, and alternating between Walter's adolescent and adult voices, the novel tells of Walter's heartbreak as he realizes that his passion cannot make up for the innate talent that he lacks.

Introduced as a child to the genius of Balanchine and the lyricism of Tchaikovsky by his stern but cultured aunt Sue Rawson, Walter has dreamed of growing up to shine in the role of the Prince in The Nutcracker. But as Walter struggles with the limits of his own talent and faces the knowledge that Mitch and Susan, his more gifted friends, have already surpassed him, Daniel, his older brother, awakens one morning with a strange lump on his neck that leads to fearful consequences--and to Walter's realization that a happy family, and a son's place in it, can tragically change overnight. The year that follows will in fact transform the lives not only of the McClouds but also of Susan, who becomes deeply involved with the sick Daniel, and Mitch, the handsome and supremely talented dancer with whom Walter is desperately in love. Into this absorbing narrative Hamilton weaves a place of almost mythical healing, the family's summer home at Lake Margaret, Wisconsin, where for generations the clan has gathered on both happy and unhappy occasions.

Only a writer of Jane Hamilton's sensitivity and humanity could do justice to this moving story of the torments of sexuality and the redemptive power of family and friendship. This book confirms her place as a preeminent novelist of our time.

About this title

About the Author

Jane Hamilton lives, works, and writes in an orchard farmhouse in Wisconsin. Her short stories have appeared in Harper's magazine. Her first novel, The Book of Ruth, won the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for best first novel and was a selection of the Oprah Book Club. Her second novel,  A Map of the World, was an international bestseller.

From the Back Cover

Praise for The Book of Ruth:

"Ms. Hamilton gives Ruth a humble dignity and allows her hope--but it's not a heavenly hope. It's a common one, caked with mud and held with gritted teeth. And it's probably the only kind that's worth reading about." --The New York Times Book Review

"A sly and wistful, if harrowing, human comedy. Hamilton is a new and original voice in fiction and one well worth listening to."
--The Boston Sunday Globe

"Hamilton's story builds to a shocking crescendo. Her small--town characters are as appealingly offbeat and brushed with grace as any found in Alice Hoffman's or Anne Tyler's novels."
--Glamour


Praise for A Map of the WorldM:

"It takes a writer of rare power and discipline to carry off an achievement like A Map of the World . Hamilton proves here that she is one of our best."
--Newsweek

"Ms. Hamilton has done a nimble job of showing us how precarious the illusion of safety and security really is."
--The New York Times

"Hamilton's chillingly accurate prose keeps her fine novel buoyant. She is superb in her observation of the natural world and in her examination of psychological nuance."
--The Washington Post

"Stunning prose and unforgettable characters . . . an enthralling tale of guilt, betrayal, and the terrifying ways our lives can spin out of control. A+."
--Entertainment Weekly

From the Inside Flap

amilton has removed all doubt that she belongs among the major writers of our time."
--San Francisco Chronicle

Set in Jane Hamilton's signature Midwest, The Short History of a Prince is the story of Walter McCloud and his ambition to become a great ballet dancer. With compassion and humor, and alternating between Walter's adolescent and adult voices, the novel tells of Walter's heartbreak as he realizes that his passion cannot make up for the innate talent that he lacks.

Introduced as a child to the genius of Balanchine and the lyricism of Tchaikovsky by his stern but cultured aunt Sue Rawson, Walter has dreamed of growing up to shine in the role of the Prince in The Nutcracker. But as Walter struggles with the limits of his own talent and faces the knowledge that Mitch and Susan, his more gifted friends, have already surpassed him, Daniel, his older brother, awakens one morning with a strange lump on his neck that leads to fearful conseque

Reviews

A meditative, slow-moving, and thoroughly absorbing family drama--about loving, losing, and holding on to all we can--from the author of (the Oprah-chosen) The Book of Ruth (1988) and A Map of the World (1994). The story's protagonist and primary viewpoint character is Walter McCloud, whom we observe (in alternating chapters) as a sensitive, bookish, and--he's quite sure--homosexual teenager growing up in an Illinois suburb in the early '70s among a trio of close friends and fellow ballet students, including beautiful Susan Claridge and her equally beautiful boyfriend (and Walter's sometime sexual partner), Mitch Anderson; and also 25 years later, when Walter, who has long since given up ballet, returns ``home'' to teach high-school English in Otten, Wisconsin, not far from the gorgeous lakeside summer place owned by his mother's family. It's a richly varied narrative, whose emotional high point is the lingering death from Hodgkin's disease (in 1973) of Walter's older brother Daniel (with whom Susan forms a surprisingly emotional intimate relationship, painfully reshuffling the trio's already complicated feelings for one another). Other losses, both threatened and endured, figure prominently: the likelihood that the frosty maiden aunt who had awakened Walter's aesthetic sense will force the sale of the family's beloved summer house; and Walter's burden of guilt over ``his shameful relations with Mitch, his hateful feelings toward Susan, his indifference to his brother.'' Hamilton writes beautiful summary and descriptive sentences; unfortunately, though, Walter (who is, to be sure, presented as unusually intelligent and articulate) speaks in almost precisely the same manner. This tendency toward formality creates a distance from the reader that is, however, vitiated by our genuine empathy with the novel's many vividly drawn characters (the inquisitive and querulous Mrs. Gamble is an especially memorable figure). Hamilton ends it with a beautiful coda that may remind readers of both Michael Cunningham's Flesh and Blood and James Agee's A Death in the Family. Like them, this is a lyrical, bighearted novel that won't easily be forgotten. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Funny, complicated Walter McCloud is at the heart of this quiet interior novel, which gracefully wanders back and forth between two decades?Walter's early 1970s sophomore year in high school and his late 1990s stint as a small-town Midwest high school teacher. As Hamilton has shown in Map of the World (LJ 5/15/94), no one writes better of the abyss that cracks apart family members facing the loss of a child. As Walter's 18-year-old brother, Daniel, lies dying of cancer during much of the 1972-73 school year, Walter comes to grips with his own homosexuality and the inaccessibility of his parents, who are swallowed up in their grief. Walter's pivotal friendships with the beautiful Susan and Mitch, the boy they both love, sustains, shatters, and alters his sense of self as he stumbles toward adulthood. Hamilton's forte?depicting adolescents left not by villainy but by circumstance on the fringes of family life while they figure out ways to raise themselves?is at its most painful clarity in this novel. Highly recommended.
-?Beth E. Anderson, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., Mich.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

AUGUST
1972

Why Walter woke up earlier than usual on August 10, Saturday, he couldn't at first explain. The collies next door were barking at the air, as always, no space for brains in the tiny knob between their pedigreed ears. It had rained in the night and the summer sun was already drawing steam from the moist ground. Walter would later say that he felt her, that it wasn't the light cutting through the misty heat or the rumpus of the Gamble dogs that made him sit up. He had gone to the window and looked out. It was like the dawn of the world down below, so green and vapory and lush with fronds, and when the lilac tree shook in her yard he admitted that his foolish heart came up his throat. He was still half asleep, and for an instant'just that long--he expected to see a reptile reeling in breakfast on its sticky tongue or a dragonfly, all veiny wings, the size of a model airplane. Thank God! It was instead Mrs. Gamble snapping at the dying wood of the tree with her red-handled loppers.

Woman, what have I to do with you? Walter thought, words he'd heard somewhere, in a play or from a book. It was five-thirty in the morning, the day of his Aunt Jeannie's and, also somewhat incidentally, his Uncle Ted's anniversary party. He needed his sleep, in preparation for the event. That he was awake and watching Mrs. Gamble must mean something. He was often assigning meaning to moments, saying, Here, and here, and
here is a beginning, the opening sequence of my real life. He was fifteen and he was ready for drama even if he had to construct it himself. Ideally he'd take the part of the unlikely hero, or the witty and cunning rescuer, or the artist who is at first misunderstood. And in the conflict, he guessed, he might enjoy being hurt just enough to make an appealing victim, but not so much that he'd actually suffer. How convenient it would be, too, if change was heralded, if an epoch was launched with a clarion call or unusual weather patterns, if Mrs. Gamble could get her dogs to tweet, the birds to bark when there was going to be upheaval.

He remembered how Mrs. Gamble used to sit on her toilet in the downstairs bathroom in the old days when he was over playing with Trishie Gamble, how she smoked her cigarettes and read from her book of astrological charts. The book lay open on her lap, on her apron, her pants in folds around her ankles. Her short dingy hair, as usual, was
coiled into pin curls and secured with bobby pins. She had apparently long since given up the habit of shutting the bathroom door in her own house, so what if Trishie and her son, Greg, the neighbors, the dogs, drifted by while she cast their horoscopes. Walter was Virgo, the virgin: "Exact," she told him, "methodical. Industrious. Chaste." She
said the word with relish. "Ch-haste." He didn't know what it meant, precisely, and he couldn't tell if it was something he could look forward to being. " 'The Virgoan heart,' " she recited, " 'is not quickly melted, but when once it finds itself in love's furnace it glows
with a pure white heat and takes ages to cool.' "

He conceded, to himself, that he was still afraid of her, a little, it was true, afraid to look her right in the eye. Down in the yard she was wrestling with the lilac branch, having trouble making her cut. It was one of the first signals, he would tell his friend Susan months later.
Mrs. Gamble, the augur, with her loppers, trying to clip away the canker. When she squinted up at his bedroom that Saturday morning he ducked. He went down on all fours and crawled to his bed. She had felt his gaze--he shivered at the thought of it. He should shut his eyes and dream about a carefree Walter McCloud, a slouch, the life of the party,
a boy with a new star, a new planet, a new astrological house. The Gamble collies had already barked at the neighbor, Mr. Kloper, on his way to work, and so there was no real reason he couldn't turn over and go back to sleep.

Two hours later when Walter went down to the kitchen he found his mother standing by the sink with her nose under his brother's chin, inspecting his Adam's apple. Joyce was wearing her purple-and-blue apron that went up over her shoulders and crossed in the back with an additional sash around the waist, tied in a bow. Walter had been to the ballet the night before with his aunt, and it struck him that his mother was wearing something like a costume. He wondered if a choreographer as sensitive and penetrating as Mr. George Balanchine could translate Joyce's life into dance. What would the genius ballet master do, he wondered, to get at the essence of Joyce? He sat down to his cornflakes trying to imagine what trick Mr. B. used to bring the spirit of his dancers to the fore. In a feeble beginning, he knew, he pictured Joyce rising up and skimming
across the floor on the tips of her toes doing bourrées, to pour him orange juice and set out the napkins.

"Does it hurt when I touch there?" Joyce was saying, pushing the pad of her thumb into what she thought was her older son's lymph node. "Sort of." Daniel had thrown his head back, to the limit, and the strain made his voice sound higher than usual. "She means, is it pressure, which is not necessarily a bad thing, or is it pain?" Walter said, turning the cereal box over to read the ingredients. He'd pulled a muscle in ballet class in July and his teacher had spoken to him in a similar vein, trying to pinpoint the hurt.

"That's right," Joyce said, "pressure or pain?"
"I don't know, Mom. I just feel it. It's big."
Walter glanced up from the box. "You two may be under the impression that you are alone, in our own house, but in fact you're providing Mrs. Gamble with an excellent view of the examination from her kitchen window. She probably has already figured out what's on Dan's neck. I bet she's on her way over here now with a cure-all, with some organic
liver." Daniel did not mutter a brotherly "Shut up," or try to move away from the sink. His head was still hanging back and he gurgled when he spoke.

"Organic liver?"
"I'm going to talk to the doctor, Daniel," Joyce said.
"Aw, Mom, it's all right. I don't want to mess up the day."
"Overnight you have a--protrusion--as big as a--"
Walter stood up, to see. He had not ever been athletically inclined but he understood his mother's confusion. There was no ball in any American game that he knew of for purposes of comparisons. "How'd you get that?" he asked, gaping. "I have a sore throat," Daniel said, as if that explained the vaguely three-sided growth that was slightly smaller than a tennis ball. "I woke up with it."

Over the phone the doctor prescribed aspirin and bed rest and further consultation in a day or two if the pustule hadn't drained on its own. Joyce hung up the telephone and opened the refrigerator to look at the two hundred deviled eggs she'd made the day before. The McCloud family was supposed to drive up to Wisconsin, to Lake Margaret, for Aunt Jeannie's twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Joyce did not want to leave
her son at home with such an odd malady. "Are you well enough, Daniel, to ride in the car," she said, "or are you sick enough for me, at least, to stay with you?"

Walter set his spoon down on the table and turned around to look at her. They had to go. Aunt Jeannie had asked for his help, and Joyce had made the lime Jell-O in the doughnut molds, the orange Jell-O in the fish molds, the deviled eggs, a ham and a kettle of baked beans. He realized that he'd been looking forward to the day. He didn't want to miss the occasion, and he also didn't like the idea of being at the lake, at the extravaganza, without his mother. It was she, it was her presence, that kept a family party from going off center.

There were no ballet classes in August, and Walter and his two dancing-school friends, Susan and Mitch, had been hired by Aunt Jeannie to serve the hors d'oeuvres and refill the champagne glasses. They had been instructed to wear black dress pants and white shirts and black bow ties. Aunt Jeannie had purchased silver plastic bowler hats for the
servers and commanded her daughter Francie to sew silver-sequined vests. Walter had told his friends that Aunt Jeannie was a nut case, there wasn't any straighter arrow than her husband, and so there was bound to be some excitement. They'd load the car with grocery bag after grocery bag, sacks filled with buns, cantaloupes, cherries, peaches, whole watermelons, gallons of milk. On the way Walter planned to be in the fold-out seat in the back of the station wagon, squashed against Mitch, across from Susan, all of their legs tangled together, the wind blowing through the car so that none of the other McClouds, neither his parents, nor Daniel, if he made it, could hear the conversation.

Walter had been taken from his Illinois home to Wisconsin, to Lake Margaret, through the summers ever since he was born. His great-grandfather had built the Victorian house, the barn, the pump house, the privy and the summer kitchen. The estate had passed to
Joyce's father and after his death to Joyce and her two sisters and two brothers.

Weekend after weekend Joyce's husband, Robert, stopped at the iron gate and Joyce and her two boys got out and walked up the wooded drive. That was the important part, to walk the last stretch, to see it all come slowly through the trees: first, in the far distance, the glint of the lake, and then the red and blue of the plaid hammock strung between the oaks, and the stone shepherd boy in the middle of the fountain, the grassy opening, the croquet hoops and colored balls, and finally the house itself, the lovely old white clapboard house, with scallops and latticework, the long windows, the lacy curtains, the swing on the front porch moving in the breeze.

Walter loved that walk, the feeling that you couldn't get to Lake Margaret by car, not re...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679457550
• ISBN 13: 9780679457558
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 349