Coast to Coast
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Marion and Barnaby Pierce are an American couple who are about to sell the New England house in which they have raised what seems to be a happy family. They are leaving on a trip across America in a vintage jaguar which Barnaby intends to give his son who is getting married in Los Angeles. Their long drive from coast to coast is planned to include a number of stops: the first to deposit their dog with Marion's pious, bitter sister in upstate New York.
At every stop there are memories and surprises as Barnaby and Marion live and re-live their secret dramas and, in the allusive, edgy dialogues of a long-married couple, reveal more about themselves than they care to confess. In Minneapolis, they find that their daughter, Stacey, is pregnant by one man and living with another; in Chicago, Barnaby's old writing partner, now a millionaire businessman, is unwisely lured into an old vaudeville routine; in Seattle, a meeting with a newspaper editor who once loved Marion re-opens old wounds; and in Los Angeles, their other daughter, Zara, who now calls herself Zenobia, turns out to be a shockingly unsociable member of her brother's wedding.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"It's not a tragedy. It's not quite a comedy. My agent would not be surprised to discover that we're having difficulty placing it." It's also how late-middle-aged sit-com writer Barnaby Pierce describes his fraught marriage, and the way that the prolific British writer Raphael vicariously names the hybrid genre of his own serio-comic antiromance. Told mainly through the snapping, sparring dialogue between Barnaby and his wife, Marion, as they travel from New York to California in a '67 Jag, the novel maps the course of their life together. In crisis, the two reveal and revenge each other's infidelities, discussing divorce even as they make their way cross-country to attend their son's wedding in the vehicle they plan to give him as a nuptial gift. In jest, the couple is verbally dexterous and almost flirtatious, la Beatrice and Benedict; in anger, each is ruthlessly ad hominem. Barnie scorns Marion's desire for separation--yet there is real pathos in his provocative insistence that she doesn't love him anymore--as he struggles to find ways of keeping her in his life. Jealousies run deep: Marion slept with Barnie's best friend, Hal, with whom they stay on their way west; Barnie had an affair with a woman close to Marion. And of their four children, one has died, another is estranged from the family, yet another has surprised her rather conservative family with a black boyfriend. Playing push-me pull-you over even the most minor decisions, the couple recycle arguments in the terrifyingly relentless way of the truly intimate--so accurately, in fact, that some may find the lack of forward motion frustrating. Raphael's ear is pitched acutely to American speech, but the ferocious energy of the dialogue cannot carry the novel by itself; each episode remains a brilliant set piece in a linked dramatic structure. Already published and well-received in Britain, where Raphael is widely known, the novel succeeds as a graph of human volatility and a measure of a relationship's resilience. FYI: Raphael's screenplay for Darling won an Oscar and his classic road-trip romance, Two for the Road, received a nomination. Most recently, he has collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the already big-buzz forthcoming film, Eyes Wide Shut.
