Object Lessons

Object Lessons

by
Anna Quindlen

published	1998 by Ivy Books
binding	Mass Market Paperback
isbn	080419727X (isbn13: 9780804197274)
description	"A SMALL TRIUMPH . . . Elaborate and playful . . . Honest and deeply felt . . . Here is the Quindlen wit, the sharp eye for details of class...more [close] "A SMALL TRIUMPH . . . Elaborate and playful . . . Honest and deeply felt . . . Here is the Quindlen wit, the sharp eye for details of class and manners, the ardent reading of domestic lives." --The New York Times "Set in the 1960s, OBJECT LESSONS concerns three generations of a rich Irish clan who live in an established inner suburb of New York City. . . . The patriarch, John Scanlan, is a lively figure. . . . It is [the] daughter Maggie who is trying desperately to master some object lessons. . . . Quindlen is at her best writing about the dislocations of growing up, the blows a child does not see coming." --Time "Anna Quindlen's first novel is about an experience that is the same for everyone and different for us all: the time when we suddenly see our family with an outsider's eye and begin the separation that marks our growing up. . . . Quindlen knows that all the things we ever will be can be found in some forgotten fragment of family." --The Washington Post Book World A New York Times Notable Book Selected by the Literary Guild® [close]
date added	02-14-07 edit book

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Becky rated it:

(review of isbn 080410946X)

05/19/08

Read in May, 2008

recommended to Becky by: Patricia Mavor

This book teaches that we are always in a phase of learning and discovery about ourselves, our relationships, and our environment. I would like to say it is mainly a coming of age story, but the mother and father are also learning lessons. Quindlen has a marvelous way of expressing feelings that we experience as we learn these lessons. The second quote (I typed below) rang SO true to me, it was like she could read my mind.

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"...and Maggie had l...more This book teaches that we are always in a phase of learning and discovery about ourselves, our relationships, and our environment. I would like to say it is mainly a coming of age story, but the mother and father are also learning lessons. Quindlen has a marvelous way of expressing feelings that we experience as we learn these lessons. The second quote (I typed below) rang SO true to me, it was like she could read my mind.

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"...and Maggie had lost the knack for being happy there. Until this horrible sweaty season, lines had been drawn, in her house, her neighborhood, her relationships. Some of them were lines that connected people - mother and father, friend to friend. They had al een rubbed out as surely as if they had dbeen written in chalk, not stone, and Maggie knew she could not live without them. Sometimes she sat for hours with her back agasinst the rough bark of the tree, blowing on a blade of grass beteen her fingers, wondering what would happen next. Often she cried."

"..there are somethings that aren't important. There are things that seem tremendously importat at the time and then years later you look back and thing you can't believe you ever worried so much about them."

"She had supposed that a husband and children would teach her to be one of the group, but instead she felt more and more alone among more and more people, a woman whose universe was containeed beneather her own sternum."

"This was what his entire married life had been like: long stretches of tedium illuminated by moments, unexpected, when he knew that without her he would be lost. For weeks or months they moved through their separate lives ad slept side by side as though they were two strangers who had mistakenly been assigned the same hotel room. And then something would happen and he would find himself staring at her as though he could see the soul of her, looking for an end to his troubles inside the loop of her arms, and he would be snagged with the fishhook of herself, with the barbed hook of his powerless infatuation with something that she seemed to have, some answer that she seemed to offer."

"She's one of those people who sees everything bad. And there are other people who see everything good"

...less

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Object Lessons

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