A Marriage Made at Woodstock
A Novel
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
Fred and Lorraine Stone met at the famous Woodstock music festival in upstate New York. And as all couples must, they grew up– just not in the same direction. Now in their forties, Fred has become Frederick, a sell-out accountant whose last vestige of his free-wheeling years is a vegetarian diet. Meanwhile, Lorraine, who now goes by the name Chandra (Sanskrit for changeable), has morphed into a psychology teacher and animal rights activist.
When Chandra suddenly moves out, Frederick turns back to Woodstock, that magical time, for answers. Can he discover what went wrong and reclaim their summer of love? Or has marital harmony left them behind for good?
In A Marriage Made at Woodstock, Cathie Pelletier takes an honest and hilarious look at a marriage on the verge of dissolution—and how hard it can be to reconcile who we once were with who we have become.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a novel that will surely bring her new fans, Pelletier ( The Bubble Reputation ) takes scathing aim at the vanities of older baby boomers, reading a generation's identity into imported coffee beans and therapy seminars. Frederick Stone and Chandra Kimball met at Woodstock, married soon after and consider that famous concert the seminal influence on their lives. All around them they see evidence that the graying members of their generation have sold out, but surely this can't have happened to them. True, Frederick's an accountant, but he specializes in helping small businesses and, besides, he's a vegetarian. Chandra, meanwhile, is an animal-rights activist and sometime therapist. Suddenly, Chandra moves out, claiming that Frederick no longer pays attention to her or anything she does. Distraught, Frederick calls forth his memories of Woodstock, hoping that these reflections of his marriage's beginning can help him discover what went wrong. Pelletier turns a keen satirical eye on the former hippies and other countercultural residents of Portland, Maine, and her portrait of Frederick's divorced brother, a Robert Bly-quoting veterinarian who dates women half his age, is especially sharp and funny. She is less successful at capturing the dynamics of a marriage on the rocks; for all of Frederick's musings on Chandra, the texture of their shared existence--and of its dissolution--never quite comes clear. But Pelletier keeps a straight face while chronicling the antics of grown children in this enjoyable social comedy of the '90s whose extend 30 years deep.
