Paradise Close
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The paths of an orphaned girl in 1971 and a sixty-something recluse in 2016 entwine in a novel of damaged souls and salvaged hope.
In 1971, orphan Marlise Schade—fourteen, anorectic, and evicted from the psychiatric hospital her trust fund can no longer support—finds herself alone in an ancestral home during a blizzard. Marlise’s struggles to survive there become the focal point for a host of imperiled figures, living and dead, whose stories intersect with hers and with forces roiling the U.S. in the ’70s.
Decades later, on the brink of Trump’s America, sixty-something Tee Handel is shaken by an inexplicable visitation. For years he’s nursed a deep hurt over his breakup with a captivating artist, spending his days and nights in solitude tinkering with antique clocks. What’s become of the artist, and how Tee reacts to his mysterious guest, testifies to the risk and inexorability of change.
These two seemingly unrelated tales entwine to show how the wages of the past are always with us, as are the dangerous and redemptive consequences of secrets confided and withheld.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The lush if flawed debut novel from poet Spaar (Orexia) spans the 1950s through the early Trump era with a dual narrative about lost love. In 1971, orphan Marlise Schade, 14, is released from pricey Philadelphia psychiatric hospital The Institute when her trust fund money runs out. Chapters alternate between Marlise's challenges of living on her own in an ancestral house as she loses interest in eating, and her time in The Institute, where she and the bubbly but suicidal Silas are inseparable. Spaar then goes back to the 1950s, where Marlise's mother, Beatrice, has an affair with an older German man. The second half follows professor and poet Trey "Tee" Handel in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley at the turn of the 21st century and his passionate but doomed romance with Emma Miles, an art professor and artist. Spaar then moves to 2017, picking up with Marlise visiting a museum retrospective of Silas's work and elucidating the connection between the seemingly disparate characters. Spaar offers plenty of lyrical descriptions ("Marlise felt safe inside the thick cabled sweater given her, saturated with the smell of him, like the wet wool of a sheep-studded vista in a castle tale"), but there's a dissonance between the novel's two halves that's never resolved. It's nicely written, but it doesn't quite hang together.
