New York: Vintage, 2001
They made a miniseries out of this novel the year after I moved to LA. I was taking the bus at that point, and I remember there were ads on benches everywhere. It was a little over the top.
The book itself is a little over the top though too. Except that it's also understated. Does this make any sense? It's about the life of a fading town in Maine, centered around Miles Roby, who was supposed to leave but didn't, and his family. It's slooooowly paced, except when it isn't, and the main narrative is punctuated with regular flashbacks that explain how it all came to be. You find yourself wanting a positive outcome for (most of) the characters, but just don't know if that'll happen.
This is one of those books where I think I might remember reading it - and the atmosphere it created - better than I remember the plot itself. I started it on a gloriously warm and sunny Thanksgiving afternoon, then spent a lovely portion of an evening reading snuggled in a beautiful hotel lobby. (And then finished it in bed at some point later.) The overall effect was tremendously calming.
Russo is a thoughtful writer, and I appreciated his style. A few of the moments that caught my eye:
- he "especially admired that they were dreamers who felt no urgency about bringing their dreams to fruition."
- "What did you do when you were good at just one thing, after it turned out you weren't as good as you thought?"
- "And that's the thing, she concludes. Just becasue things happen slow doesn't mean you'll be ready for them. If they happened fast, you'd be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump. 'Slow' works on an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there's plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you'll always be slower."
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