Excuse Me for Asking - Hardcover

Arnold, Janis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565120574 ISBN 13: 9781565120570

Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1994

Synopsis

Janis Arnold's joyous second novel is a story of friendship and family, of big dreams and bad dreams. Julia Salwell seems to have it all - money, a father and brother who are crazy about her, and a rich boyfriend who's co-captain of the football team in tiny Cypress Springs, Texas. But there's something wrong, something eating at Julia, something that keeps waking her up at night, screaming in the dark. When Robin Tilton meets Julia in college, it seems they've got nothing in common. Where Julia is flashy and dramatic, Robin is quiet and insecure. Where Julia breezes through, Robin has to bear down. Where Julia's rich parents will always bail her out of trouble, Robin is a scholarship student who doesn't even know who her parents are. But when Julia and Robin are thrown together as freshman-year roommates, it's just the beginning . . . of a beautiful friendship. Excuse Me for Asking is told in the voices of Julia, Robin, their families, friends, and nosy neighbors. As Julia and Robin watch their dreams collide with the reality of careers, husbands, families, and aging parents, they draw us into a touching story of women's lives and small-town America, a story involving compromises, infidelity, repression, and (possibly) a murder.

About this title

About the Author:

Janis Arnold, a native Texan, has also lived in Florida and North Carolina. She currently lives with her husband and son in San Antonio, where she teaches school. She earned a B.A. from the University of Central Florida and an M.A. from the University of Houston. Her first novel, Daughters of Memory, was published by Algonquin in 1991 and reissued as a Front Porch paperback in 1993.

From Kirkus Reviews:

People live, die, and do various other things in between in this tedious and too long second novel by the author of Daughters of Memory (1991). Although it spins a meandering yarn of two friends, Robin and Julia, who meet in college, grow apart, then reunite later, the book has no real plot; it lacks a beginning, a middle, an end, and, worst of all, a conflict--the protagonists' families and life in small-town Texas seem pretty bland. An additional problem is Arnold's decision to tell the story through the alternating viewpoints of characters both major and minor, creating mundane repetition. Our heroines are a little more interesting than their presentation. Julia is a charismatic enigma, a flamboyant magnet with an element of all-talk/no-action to her. She smokes enthusiastically, has dreadful nightmares, fights with her mom a lot, gets an abortion before college, and marries a dull man with whom she has two children. Robin is the conservative mouse. Raised by her Aunt Kate (she's told her parents are dead), she becomes an unwed mother and schoolteacher, settles in Cypress Springs (where Julia is living), then marries the best man from Julia's wedding and has two more children. Small squalls arise along the way: There are several funerals, and Robin sifts through the mysteries of her past because she wants her children to have a sense of family history. Among the few high points is Julia's abortion, related by her in the second person, which conveys her denial and desperation with startling intensity. The narrative's disconnected leaps and bounds are actually a bonus: They indicate that little changes in the characters' lives, while they enable readers to avoid at least some of the boring details. Short story material padded with minutiae to create a novel. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 1565120574
• ISBN 13: 9781565120570
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 351