David Schwinghammer's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-sixties"
Cruel, Beautiful, World
CRUEL BEAUTIFUL WORLD is about the Gold family with varying viewpoints, including the villain.
Iris Gold takes in two little girls, Charlotte and Lucy, who turn out to be her little half sisters, which is rather hard to believe since at one point Iris is eighty and Charlotte is in her early twenties. But her father was married several times and he always had a preference for younger women. Do the arithmetic.
The plot thickens when sixteen-year-old Lucy runs off with her unconventional English teacher, who is thirty. He has a job in a progressive school where the kids decide what they're going to study, or if they're going to study, which eventually grates on him, since he's really a controlling type.
Charlotte and Iris have no idea what happened to Lucy. She just disappeared. Eventually she sends a postcard, telling them that she's okay and happy.
The setting occurs during the Manson trials, and Lucy is scared being alone out in the country. William buys her a gun. As a reader you're thinking, “Oh, no, that's not good.” He tries to teach her to use it, but she's so scared she hurts herself. But, for some reason, she keeps it in her bedside table.
Lucy has nothing to do out there, but write, which she's rather good at, one of the only classes she's good at; whereas Charlotte is an academic superstar until she starts college at Brandeis, where she soon finds she doesn't have enough math or science to compete. Lucy's boredom leads to long walks where she eventually runs across a roadside stand that sells veggies, fruit, and flowers. She asks Patrick, the owner, for a job and she gets it. Comparing the two men in her life leads to a realization that she's miserable. That's when we get the big twist rather like the one in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, where the main character is killed off by a murderous Mexican drug thug.
Eventually Charlotte gets a call from Lucy asking her to come and get her. But Charlotte has a job as a veterinarian intern and doesn't want to risk losing it, so she waits until her shift is over. She has the shock of her life when she arrives at the cabin where Lucy was living with William.
Now Charlotte turns detective, tracking down William, whom she has a feeling is still at large. Author Caroline Leavitt intrudes with a late life romance involving Iris, who was at one time married to a gay man, whom she never left. Some readers might be grossed out by Leavitt's sex scene involving two eighty-year-olds, but it kind of reminded me of Kent Haruf's handling of these types of situations in PLAINSONG.
Some of you are going to hate this book because of the unrealistic plot and the fade away ending with some plot lines unresolved, but I thought it had likable characters, some of whom could have passed for real life people. And sixteen-year-olds do make poor choices, and sometimes eighty-year-olds meet the love of their life when they're eighty.
Iris Gold takes in two little girls, Charlotte and Lucy, who turn out to be her little half sisters, which is rather hard to believe since at one point Iris is eighty and Charlotte is in her early twenties. But her father was married several times and he always had a preference for younger women. Do the arithmetic.
The plot thickens when sixteen-year-old Lucy runs off with her unconventional English teacher, who is thirty. He has a job in a progressive school where the kids decide what they're going to study, or if they're going to study, which eventually grates on him, since he's really a controlling type.
Charlotte and Iris have no idea what happened to Lucy. She just disappeared. Eventually she sends a postcard, telling them that she's okay and happy.
The setting occurs during the Manson trials, and Lucy is scared being alone out in the country. William buys her a gun. As a reader you're thinking, “Oh, no, that's not good.” He tries to teach her to use it, but she's so scared she hurts herself. But, for some reason, she keeps it in her bedside table.
Lucy has nothing to do out there, but write, which she's rather good at, one of the only classes she's good at; whereas Charlotte is an academic superstar until she starts college at Brandeis, where she soon finds she doesn't have enough math or science to compete. Lucy's boredom leads to long walks where she eventually runs across a roadside stand that sells veggies, fruit, and flowers. She asks Patrick, the owner, for a job and she gets it. Comparing the two men in her life leads to a realization that she's miserable. That's when we get the big twist rather like the one in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, where the main character is killed off by a murderous Mexican drug thug.
Eventually Charlotte gets a call from Lucy asking her to come and get her. But Charlotte has a job as a veterinarian intern and doesn't want to risk losing it, so she waits until her shift is over. She has the shock of her life when she arrives at the cabin where Lucy was living with William.
Now Charlotte turns detective, tracking down William, whom she has a feeling is still at large. Author Caroline Leavitt intrudes with a late life romance involving Iris, who was at one time married to a gay man, whom she never left. Some readers might be grossed out by Leavitt's sex scene involving two eighty-year-olds, but it kind of reminded me of Kent Haruf's handling of these types of situations in PLAINSONG.
Some of you are going to hate this book because of the unrealistic plot and the fade away ending with some plot lines unresolved, but I thought it had likable characters, some of whom could have passed for real life people. And sixteen-year-olds do make poor choices, and sometimes eighty-year-olds meet the love of their life when they're eighty.
