The Measures Between Us
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Jack is an intern for the university's flood study. Transcribing interviews with people who live along a threatened and threatening river, he listens to their answers to questions about environmental change and their emotional investment in the waterway.
Lately, Jack has questions for Cynthia. They've become close, reuniting years after high school, but now she's distancing herself again, sinking into depression. Her parents have noticed, too, calling on the only professional they know: Henry, a psychology professor who was once a student in her father's middle school shop class. Henry wants to help, but he is also dealing with a household in jeopardy: there's a stubborn wedge between him and his pregnant wife.
By turns sweeping and intimate, The Measures Between Us is about the shifting covenants we make with ourselves and with the ones we love, about the distances we keep and those we're bent on erasing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New York Times editor Hauser's high-reaching, affecting debut novel chronicles three families in the Boston suburbs as they face personal crises. Vincent Pareto, a high school woodworking teacher, and his wife, Mary, care for their 22-year-old daughter, Cynthia, who has moved back home after breaking up with her boyfriend in California. The Paretos, worried about Cynthia's depression, send her to a top-line psychiatric hospital on the advice of Dr. Henry Wheeling, a young psychologist teaching at Boston University and Vincent's former student. In the meantime, Henry's pregnant wife Lucinda, feeling "suffocated," decides to visit an old college roommate in El Paso while Henry carries on an affair with Samantha Webster, one of his graduate students. Hope slowly begins to reenter these characters' lives, with Cynthia, after leaving psychiatric care, being hired as a babysitter by Sam Newell a single parent struggling to raise an autistic son, Brandon, after his wife Alice's suicide. Mary happens to meets Alice's father, Tom Slater, at church, and the two form a close but platonic bond. Cynthia's battle with depression provides the multithreaded narrative's most heart-wrenching scenes, while a torrential rainstorm provides a dramatic backdrop for the various storylines to play out.
