Mid-Air: Two Novellas
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Publisher Description
“[B[oth these fine novellas unfurl the kind of complicated family tapestries that every generation ends up weaving from money and love.” —Wall Street Journal
Fate is explored in the fall and rise of two twentieth-century American families.
Victoria Shorr’s remarkable gift for depicting the inner lives of complex characters shines in two powerful explorations of family, ambition, class, and status.
In “Great Uncle Edward,” a family gathers for dinner. At ninety-three, Great Uncle Edward commands the table in his three-piece suit; Cousin Russell attended both Harvard and Yale but is now reduced to selling off the family books; sisters Betty and Molly are caught between ghosts of a storied past and creeping destitution. These lives are signposts along the downward spiral of an old aristocracy. “Cleveland Auto Wrecking” introduces Sam White, an immigrant from eastern Europe. He cannot read but has a gift for math and an instinct for the value of junk. We follow his clan through the Depression to the postwar boom in the West, where their fortunes soar, creating new tests of loyalty.
Taken together, these two novellas might be the reverse images of the American dream in the twentieth century. They ask to what degree, in the face of such powerful forces as love, death, and social constraints, do any of us have control over our own lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shorr proves herself a literary mimic of the first order with these two pitch-perfect stories. The first, "Great Uncle Edward" is an Auchincloss-like examination of old money New York in the late 1970s. The unnamed narrator holds a dinner party for her husband's 93-year-old great-uncle, Edward. Dinner conversation ranges over the family's history, and names of family acquaintances are dropped, from George Washington and Toussaint Louverture to Edith "Pussy" Wharton and Ved Mehta. Along the way, there are hints that their WASPy way of life will soon be obsolete. In the second, "Cleveland Auto Wrecking," Sam White is an Eastern European immigrant who arrives at 13 at Ellis Island at the turn of the 20th century and ends up living in Youngstown, Ohio, where he marries, fathers three sons, and, after years of struggle, does well in the scrap metal business. Sam begins parlaying his scrap metal success into Southern California real estate ventures, which ultimately make the Whites' fortune. But when one son dates a woman above his class, it causes friction inside the family. The author cleverly juxtaposes how one aspect of American society falls as another rises, and both novellas have a novellike density of detail and depth of characterization. Together, they offer rich rewards.
