Private Life (Hardcover)
| Author: Jane Smiley |
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| Format: | Hardcover Large Print |
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Product Details:
Format: Hardcover Large Print
Publisher: Center Point Large Print
ISBN-10: 1602858152
ISBN-13: 9781602858152
Sku: 215095041
Publish Date: 3/30/2010
Pages:
541
Age Range:
NA
See more in Psychological
Annotation:
Inspired in part by the life her great aunt and uncle, Pulitzer-winning author Jane Smiley paints a devastating portrait of an independent young woman whose life is wasted in a decades-long marriage to a megalomaniacal scientist husband. With her father and brothers dead, Margaret Mayfield is told by her mother that she needs to marry to support herself. The man she finds for a husband, Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early, is a wildly eccentric would-be genius devoted to making order of the chaotic universe. The two retreat to a California observatory where Margaret struggles to make peace with her marriage, even as Andrew proves increasingly erratic in his mind and cold in his heart. Finally, on the onset of World War II, he takes an action that Margaret cannot abide--but by then it is too late. With Margaret and Andrew Early, Smiley has created a searing portrait of two magnificently flawed individuals, shackled together in madness and failure. PRIVATE LIFE is a bleak but powerful tale of a woman brought low by the cruelties of economics, cultural expectations, gender inequity, and the tyrannical personality of the man she was supposed to love.
Inspired in part by the life her great aunt and uncle, Pulitzer-winning author Jane Smiley paints a devastating portrait of an independent young woman whose life is wasted in a decades-long marriage to a megalomaniacal scientist husband. With her father and brothers dead, Margaret Mayfield is told by her mother that she needs to marry to support herself. The man she finds for a husband, Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early, is a wildly eccentric would-be genius devoted to making order of the chaotic universe. The two retreat to a California observatory where Margaret struggles to make peace with her marriage, even as Andrew proves increasingly erratic in his mind and cold in his heart. Finally, on the onset of World War II, he takes an action that Margaret cannot abide--but by then it is too late. With Margaret and Andrew Early, Smiley has created a searing portrait of two magnificently flawed individuals, shackled together in madness and failure. PRIVATE LIFE is a bleak but powerful tale of a woman brought low by the cruelties of economics, cultural expectations, gender inequity, and the tyrannical personality of the man she was supposed to love.
Author Bio
Jane Smiley
An only child, Jane Smiley grew up outside St. Louis with her mother and grandmother; her father deserted the family when she was a year old. Her mother was a newspaper editor. Smiley determined from a very early age that she would become a fiction writer. She graduated from Vassar in 1971 and also has an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. For many years, she taught at Iowa State. Her first novel was published in 1980. She has been married three times.
Praise
"PRIVATE LIFE [covers] 60 years and two world wars and [is] stuffed with information about earthquakes, astronomy, farming, and plagues....By the end, the reader has a sense of lives lived, of the slide from one century to the next. However complicated and different this mismatched pair--the husband so loud, the wife so quiet--we appreciate their careful portraits."
- Mameve Medwed
05/02/2010
"[W]hat elevates this tale of a blisteringly unhappy marriage into something far more compelling and tragic is Smiley's willingness to blend acute sympathy with outright absurdity....[PRIVATE LIFE] should only enhance Smiley's reputation as one of the most innovative and accomplished writers currently at work."
- Alex Clark
04/30/2010
"[E]xtraordinarily powerful....Smiley's virtuosity should be no surprise to us....But PRIVATE LIFE is a quantum leap for this author, a book that...burrows deep into the psyche and stays. It kept me up all night, long after I'd finished it, remembering the lives of my mother and grandmothers, recalling every novel about women I had ever read, from ANNA KARENINA to MY ANTONIA....It's not often that a work as exceptional as this comes along in contemporary American letters."
- Marie Arana
05/11/2010
"Smiley plays [her] scenes out gradually, finessing the increments that build domestic anxiety to extend and enrich her central concern: a fully fleshed portrait of the conflicted loyalties of a woman raised to be a submissive wife, a constant support to her husband. She makes us see that Margaret is not only a person to whom things happen but is necessarily implicated in her own evolving fate."
- Sven Birkerts
05/16/2010
"In this precise, compelling depiction of a singular woman, Smiley creates an inner world as expansive as her character's outer world is constrained."
06/14/2010
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