Goldengrove
Francine Prose, 2009
HarperCollins
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060560027
Summary
At the center of Francine Prose's profoundly moving new novel is a young girl facing the consequences of sudden loss after the death of her sister. As her parents drift toward their own risky consolations, thirteen-year-old Nico is left alone to grope toward understanding and clarity, falling into a seductive, dangerous relationship with her sister's enigmatic boyfriend.
Over one haunted summer, Nico must face that life-changing moment when children realize their parents can no longer help them. She learns about the power of art, of time and place, the mystery of loss and recovery. But for all the darkness at the novel's heart, the narrative itself is radiant with the lightness of summer and charged by the restless sexual tension of teenage life.
Goldengrove takes its place among the great novels of adolescence, beside Henry James's The Awkward Age and L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1947
• Where—Brooklyn, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Radcliffe College
• Awards—Pushcart Prize; PEN-America prize for translation; Guggenheim Fellowship
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York
When it comes to an author as eclectic as Francine Prose, it's difficult to find the unifying thread in her work. But, if one were to examine her entire oeuvre—from novels and short stories to essays and criticism—a love of reading would seem to be the animating force.
That may not seem extraordinary, especially for a writer, but Prose is uncommonly passionate about the link between reading and writing. "I've always read," she confessed in a 1998 interview with Atlantic Unbound. "I started when I was four years old and just didn't stop.... The only reason I wanted to be a writer was because I was such an avid reader." (In 2006, she produced an entire book on the subject—a nuts-and-bolts primer entitled Reading Like a Writer, in which she uses excerpts from classic and contemporary literature to illustrate her personal notions of literary excellence.)
If Prose is specific about the kind of writing she, herself, likes to read, she's equally voluble about what puts her off. She is particularly vexed by "obvious, tired cliches; lazy, ungrammatical writing; implausible plot turns." Unsurprisingly, all of these are notably absent in her own work. Even when she explores tried-and-true literary conventions—such as the illicit romantic relationship at the heart of her best known novel, Blue Angel—she livens them with wit and irony. She even borrowed her title from the famous Josef von Sternberg film dealing with a similar subject.
As biting and clever as she is, Prose cringes whenever her work is referred to as satire. She explained to Barnes & Noble editors, "Satirical to me means one-dimensional characters...whereas, I think of myself as a novelist who happens to be funny—who's writing characters that are as rounded and artfully developed as the writers of tragic novels."
Prose's assessment of her own work is pretty accurate. Although her subject matter is often ripe for satire (religious fanaticism in Household Saints, tabloid journalism in Bigfoot Dreams, upper-class pretensions in Primitive People), etc.), she takes care to invest her characters with humanity and approaches them with respect. "I really do love my characters," she says, "but I feel that I want to take a very hard look at them. I don't find them guilty of anything I'm not guilty of myself."
Best known for her fiction, Prose has also written literary criticism for the New York Times, art criticism for the Wall Street Journal, and children's books based on Jewish folklore, all of it infused with her alchemic blend of humor, insight,and intelligence.
Extras
• Prose rarely wastes an idea. In Blue Angel, the novel that the character Angela is writing is actually a discarded novel that Prose started before stopping because, in her own words, "it seemed so juvenile to me."
• While she once had no problem slamming a book in one of her literary critiques, these days Prose has resolved to only review books that she actually likes. The ones that don't adhere to her high standards are simply returned to the senders.
• Prose's novel Household Saints was adapted into an excellent film starring Tracey Ullman, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Lili Taylor in 1993.
• Another novel, The Glorious Ones, was adapted into a musical.
• In 2002 Prose published The Lives of the Muses, an intriguing hybrid of biography, philosophy, and gender studies that examines nine women who inspired famous artists and thinkers—from John Lennon's wife Yoko Ono to Alice Liddell, the child who inspired Alice in Wonderland. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Prose's modest-sounding book turns out to be beautifully wrought. And it blossoms into a smart, gimlet-eyed account of what 13-year-old Nico sees happening around her after the loss of the more alluring, glamorous and manipulative Margaret. Nico's experience goes well beyond the realms of adolescence and family dynamics and yields an unexpectedly rich, tart, eye-opening sense of Nico's world…Goldengrove is one of Ms. Prose's gentler books—far more so than the bitingly satirical A Changed Man. But it's not a sentimental one. It draws the reader into and then out of "that hushed and watery border zone where we live alongside the dead," and it does this with mostly effortless narrative verve. And it scorns the bathos of its genre, so it does not become an invitation to wallow in suffering. It prefers the comforts of strength, growth and forward motion.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Nico is such a dynamic, unsettled character that she compels us through a story that could have been grim and static.... What's surprising about Goldengrove is how exciting it becomes. Margaret's hunky boyfriend never paid Nico much attention before, but in the throes of his sorrow, he seeks her out. Despite the age difference, the two of them discover that their shared loss provides the basis for a comforting friendship. It's also charged with an unsettling element of eroticism, and here Prose is at her very best, ratcheting up the creepy elements of this relationship. Again and again, she tempts us to suspect that Nico is in real danger only to reassure us a moment later that she's safe and sound. It's a perfect blend of the 13-year-old's persistent innocence and erratic shrewdness, all wildly confused by grief and sexual attraction. The result is a gripping crisis with strong allusions to Hitchcock's Vertigo.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
In Prose's deeply touching and absorbing 15th novel, narrator Nico, 13, comes upon Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Spring and Fall" (which opens "Margaret, are you grieving/ Over Goldengrove unleaving?") in her father's upstate New York bookstore, also named Goldengrove. It's the summer after her adored older sister, Margaret—possessed of beauty, a lovely singing voice and a poetic nature—casually dove from a rowboat in a nearby lake and drowned. In emotive detail, Nico relates the subsequent events of that summer. Nico was a willing confidant and decoy in Margaret's clandestine romance with a high school classmate, Aaron, and Nico now finds that she and Aaron are drawn to each other in their mutual bereavement. Unhinged by grief, Nico's parents are distracted and careless in their oversight of Nico, and Nico is deep in perilous waters before she realizes that she is out of her depth. Prose eschews her familiar satiric mode. She fluidly maintains Nico's tender insights into the human condition as Nico comes to discover her own way of growing up and moving on.
Publishers Weekly
(Adult/High School) An evocative, emotionally rich story of female adolescence and grief. Nico, the 13-year-old protagonist, lives a life of ease in her family's lake house. Her parents are well-intentioned and progressive. Her older sister is in many ways the center of Nico's universe—Nico is fascinated by Margaret's beauty, her cigarette habit, and her femininity. There is obvious love between the two of them, and a shared intelligence and wit that manifests itself in their conversation. Because Nico's awe of her sister is evident from the start, the situation is all the more painful when Margaret drowns. The narrative then focuses on Nico's grief, her attempt to reconcile her sadness with her growing feelings for Margaret's brooding boyfriend, and the family's attempt to redefine itself. As usual, Prose's writing is spot-on: she conveys the psychological turmoil of the situation with stark, simple language and tempers the sadness with moments of dry humor. Nico has a decidedly adult voice, but teen readers will nevertheless appreciate her wisdom and her confusion, her selfishness and her budding sexuality. The author taps into the deepest corners of her characters' minds and spins a hook-filled plot around a complex protagonist. Fans of Sarah Dessen, Sara Zarr, and Deb Caletti will enjoy Goldengrove immensely. —Caitlin Fralick, Ottawa Public Library, ON
School Library Journal
The emotional challenges of adolescence are exacerbated by the ordeal of bereavement in Prose's plaintive novel. The stage is set in a first chapter that details the relationship between 13-year-old narrator Nico and her beautiful older sister Margaret, a headstrong charmer who channels the auras of romantic movies and popular songs into a vibrant personality that Nico simultaneously adores and despairs of ever equaling. Then the unthinkable happens. Margaret perishes in a boating accident (on a lake in upstate New York), and Nico is thrust into the maelstrom of grief that afflicts her sister's artistically gifted boyfriend Aaron, her angry and self-pitying mother and her stoical father (owner of the bookstore in which Nico, while browsing, discovers the limpid Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that gave Margaret her name and—Nico surmises—may have influenced her fate). Though less fully plotted than it might be, this moving novel succeeds by sticking closely to Nico's stormy emotions, as she explores the newly aroused fears that redefine her relationship with her parents, while learning on the fly to deal with Aaron's borderline-creepy appropriation of her attention (drawing her into "our hopeless love triangle with the dead"). And Prose gives it a persuasive further dimension in the leitmotif of the historical incident that obsesses Nico's father: the story of a doomsday cult that anticipated the end of the world and awaited the occurrence on a remote promontory thereafter known as Disappointment Hill. As a lucid and moving chronicle of growing up baffled and challenged, this novel is energized by a thoughtful quality of impertinent wit that sometimes recalls J.D.Salinger in his heyday (though many readers will be reminded even more strongly of L.P. Hartley's novel The Go-Between and Ian McEwan's contemporary classic Atonement). Arguably a tad too wistfully meditative, Prose's latest novel nevertheless charms and persuades.
Kirkus Reviews
Book Club Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Goldengrove:
1. Nico's love for her sister Margaret borders on worship. What was so special about Margaret that drew Nico to her so intensely? Were you, as well, drawn to her?
2. Discuss the significance of the novel's title—and how Margaret came by her name. What implications might that have had for Margaret's fate?
3. Talk about Nico's parents and the way in which they handle their grief. How does the family reconfigure itself after Margaret's death? Is it possible to judge how anyone handles the loss of a loved one, especially a child?
4. What is the progression of Nico's grief—how does she cope...or not cope? In what way does her relationship with her parents change during the novel? How does she come to view herself?
5. Were you comfortable or uncomfortable with Nico and Aaron's growing relationship? What do you think of Aaron?
6. How do references to Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo and to the Millerite cult relate to the story? Do those allusions enrich the story for you...or not?
7. This is seen as a "coming of age" story in which a young person is initiated into the adult world, usually by crossing over a traumatic threshold. The child-become-adult leaves behind childish things and learns a valuable "adult" lesson. In this novel, what does Nico come to understand about herself and the way the world works? Whether you're already an adult or a young person, what, if anything, did you learn in reading Goldengrove?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)