Elizabeth Graver's Blog, page 5
March 24, 2013
Judicial Review Discusses The End of the Point, with author response
A lively arts forum where four people discuss the point of Elizabeth Graver's novel, The End of the Point. Read responses by Roberta Silman, Charlotte Bacon, Debby Waldman, and George Salvador, along with Elizabeth Graver's response.
Readers are invited to join the discussion!
http://artsfuse.org/78404/judicial-re...
Readers are invited to join the discussion!
http://artsfuse.org/78404/judicial-re...
March 16, 2013
New York Times Review
The End of the Point received a lovely, smart, perceptive New York Times review by Alida Becker today. It's an amazing feeling to work so long and so hard and in such a private, largely solitary way on a book--this one took me over seven years to write--and then to send it off into the world and have it find readers who GET it. For me, this is a very particular sense of being seen, not for your own self--for the writing is not my self, exactly--but for some essential soul-ness that is and is not the self, that is, perhaps, the self combined with the world and the imagination, the book a little piece of architecture born from the long process of coaxing and knocking down, of reworking, dreaming, doubting, trusting and (mostly) returning and returning to try to get it right.
I remember going back to give a reading from my first novel, Unravelling, at Wesleyan University, where I'd been an undergraduate some years before. My mentor and teacher, Annie Dillard, was there, and she pulled me aside moments before the reading and said, "We've known each other socially over the years, and as student and teacher, and now I've read your novel. Which way do I know you better?"
"Through reading the novel," I said.
"Knock 'em dead, kiddo," Annie said and sent me out to read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/boo...The End of the Point
I remember going back to give a reading from my first novel, Unravelling, at Wesleyan University, where I'd been an undergraduate some years before. My mentor and teacher, Annie Dillard, was there, and she pulled me aside moments before the reading and said, "We've known each other socially over the years, and as student and teacher, and now I've read your novel. Which way do I know you better?"
"Through reading the novel," I said.
"Knock 'em dead, kiddo," Annie said and sent me out to read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/boo...The End of the Point
March 11, 2013
How Did The End of the Point Originate?
How did The End of the Point originate?
This book took me a long time to write, both because of the particular challenges and pleasures that went into it and because over the past decade, my non-writing life has been very full—with the birth of two children, the illness and death of my father, the daily routines of teaching and family life, and, perhaps most centrally, the growing sense that I didn’t want to rush; time moves fast enough on its own. Over the years, as the story took shape, I spent a part of every summer and many fall and spring weekends at the real place that my fictional place grew out of. Often,while I was there, I wrote. I walked the paths, navigated the rocks to swim in the ocean and began to feel that the land—and the one-room cabin my husband had built on it—was a kind of home to me—not (as it is to my husband and our daughters) a first home, but a surrogate second home, at once alluring and vexed. I watched my children learn to walk, swim and live in nature there, the place a great gift for them but also a complicated privilege and even a danger—for how fully it can shelter and how much it can exclude. I used this real place as a way to begin to imagine my fictional Ashaunt Point.
This book took me a long time to write, both because of the particular challenges and pleasures that went into it and because over the past decade, my non-writing life has been very full—with the birth of two children, the illness and death of my father, the daily routines of teaching and family life, and, perhaps most centrally, the growing sense that I didn’t want to rush; time moves fast enough on its own. Over the years, as the story took shape, I spent a part of every summer and many fall and spring weekends at the real place that my fictional place grew out of. Often,while I was there, I wrote. I walked the paths, navigated the rocks to swim in the ocean and began to feel that the land—and the one-room cabin my husband had built on it—was a kind of home to me—not (as it is to my husband and our daughters) a first home, but a surrogate second home, at once alluring and vexed. I watched my children learn to walk, swim and live in nature there, the place a great gift for them but also a complicated privilege and even a danger—for how fully it can shelter and how much it can exclude. I used this real place as a way to begin to imagine my fictional Ashaunt Point.
Nomad Reader Blogs on The End of the Point
Monday, March 11, 2013
book review: The End of the Point by Elizabeth Graver
The basics: Spanning three generations of the Porter family and fifty years of their relationships with their hired help, The End of the Point focuses on the family at four different times in history, beginning in the 1950's. Much of the novel takes place at their summer home in Ashaunt, Massachusetts.
My thoughts: Reading The End of the Point made me realize how much I love present-future narrators. As the story of the Porter family unfolds, the reader gets hints of how things are now, even though the story is told in the moment:
"If things had turned out differently, she would have begun the story here--or no, Smitty would have told it; unlike Bea, he loved an audience, he'd have made it funny, drawn it out."
These moments aren't frequent, but as I encountered each one, it felt as though I was unwrapping a present. We don't have the certainty of the future in our own lives, but literature can provide us with one for these characters. It's a testament to Graver's writing and character building that this technique feels so real. I was utterly absorbed in this family that kept growing in number as the generations increased. Graver infuses so much richness into each of them, it's astonishing the novel is as short as it is. It feels more epic than its number of pages, and it feels like a complete story of the people in their time and place. Ashaunt is a character itself:
"She loves her house with a tenderness that makes it feel almost human."
I pictured it so vividly and delighted in seeing how the bedrooms changed hands over the years and depending on which siblings and cousins were there on a given weekend. In fact, as the narrative moved forward to the next moment in time, the house provides the structure, both literally and figuratively, as the reader takes stock of what has changed since the last moment in time.
As I read the last pages, I wept openly and publicly in the airport terminal. When I turned the last page, I was immensely satisfied, yet sad to say goodbye to these characters who felt like family in the two short days I spent with them. Most of all, I wondered how I had not heard of Elizabeth Graver until this, her fourth novel.
Favorite passage: "Largely, now, it was not anger he felt, but rather a kind of bone-scraping, quiet, ever-present sorrow. To come to the place that was supposed to stay the same, to come and find it changed. Dr. Miller had warned him against what he called the "geographic cure." You can't fix yourself by going somewhere else, he'd said. You'll always take yourself along."
The verdict: The End of the Point is a beautifully written, deeply moving portrait of three generations of the Porter family and the their evolving relationships with their servants and caregivers.
http://nomadreader.blogspot.com/2013/...
book review: The End of the Point by Elizabeth Graver
The basics: Spanning three generations of the Porter family and fifty years of their relationships with their hired help, The End of the Point focuses on the family at four different times in history, beginning in the 1950's. Much of the novel takes place at their summer home in Ashaunt, Massachusetts.
My thoughts: Reading The End of the Point made me realize how much I love present-future narrators. As the story of the Porter family unfolds, the reader gets hints of how things are now, even though the story is told in the moment:
"If things had turned out differently, she would have begun the story here--or no, Smitty would have told it; unlike Bea, he loved an audience, he'd have made it funny, drawn it out."
These moments aren't frequent, but as I encountered each one, it felt as though I was unwrapping a present. We don't have the certainty of the future in our own lives, but literature can provide us with one for these characters. It's a testament to Graver's writing and character building that this technique feels so real. I was utterly absorbed in this family that kept growing in number as the generations increased. Graver infuses so much richness into each of them, it's astonishing the novel is as short as it is. It feels more epic than its number of pages, and it feels like a complete story of the people in their time and place. Ashaunt is a character itself:
"She loves her house with a tenderness that makes it feel almost human."
I pictured it so vividly and delighted in seeing how the bedrooms changed hands over the years and depending on which siblings and cousins were there on a given weekend. In fact, as the narrative moved forward to the next moment in time, the house provides the structure, both literally and figuratively, as the reader takes stock of what has changed since the last moment in time.
As I read the last pages, I wept openly and publicly in the airport terminal. When I turned the last page, I was immensely satisfied, yet sad to say goodbye to these characters who felt like family in the two short days I spent with them. Most of all, I wondered how I had not heard of Elizabeth Graver until this, her fourth novel.
Favorite passage: "Largely, now, it was not anger he felt, but rather a kind of bone-scraping, quiet, ever-present sorrow. To come to the place that was supposed to stay the same, to come and find it changed. Dr. Miller had warned him against what he called the "geographic cure." You can't fix yourself by going somewhere else, he'd said. You'll always take yourself along."
The verdict: The End of the Point is a beautifully written, deeply moving portrait of three generations of the Porter family and the their evolving relationships with their servants and caregivers.
http://nomadreader.blogspot.com/2013/...
The Page 69 Test
I was asked to do this fun blog entry for a site called The Page 69 Test, where writers examine how Page 69 of their books shed light on the larger work.
http://page69test.blogspot.com/2013/0...
http://page69test.blogspot.com/2013/0...
March 6, 2013
On Place in Fiction
n her 1956 essay, “Place in Fiction,” Eudora Welty writes about the underlying bond that connects all of the arts with place: “All [the arts] celebrate its mystery. Where does this mystery lie? Is it in the fact that place has a more lasting identity than we have?”
The setting of my new novel, The End of the Point — a fictional two mile spit of land on Massachusetts’ Buzzards Bay — does indeed have a more lasting identity than its people. I begin the book with a land transfer from the Wampanoag Indians to the Colonists in 1652 and end it in 1999, when a summer community is under some threat from human and natural forces alike. Place in my novel is a kind of central character — the rocks, the paths, the land in nature and outside of it. People in The End of the Point beg, borrow, steal, gift, set ablaze, mythologize, tear down, reject and love their rocky, windswept little jut of land.
I ended my novel in 1999 because the year felt like a way to mark a time before: Before the century turned, of course, and before 9/11, but also before the rapid acceleration that marks our 21st-century and that I view as having a profound impact our sense of place. We live in a staggeringly mobile age, where place is increasingly as much virtual as real. These crossings bring many gifts and possibilities, but they may also carry a danger of rootlessness, of disembodiment, of an “everywhere” that is, paradoxically, neither here nor there.
My novel’s four main sections take place in 1942, the 1950′s and 60′s, 1970, and 1999. People communicate with each other and themselves in the most material ways – with telegrams, letters, diaries, a message in a bottle. No one has a cell phone. When the characters are alone, they are truly alone. When they talk, they, well, talk (understanding each other is another thing, plus ça change).
What, I wonder, would Welty make of where we are now, roaming the internet on our warming planet, where actual, physical place as we know it may well not have a lasting identity, at least if we don’t radically change course? The title The End of the Point carries a double meaning – “end” as in furthest point on a peninsula, “end” as in demise. In my book, I celebrate the “there-ness” of a beloved place, even as the second meaning, the demise, hovers just outside the margin, too close to home.
The setting of my new novel, The End of the Point — a fictional two mile spit of land on Massachusetts’ Buzzards Bay — does indeed have a more lasting identity than its people. I begin the book with a land transfer from the Wampanoag Indians to the Colonists in 1652 and end it in 1999, when a summer community is under some threat from human and natural forces alike. Place in my novel is a kind of central character — the rocks, the paths, the land in nature and outside of it. People in The End of the Point beg, borrow, steal, gift, set ablaze, mythologize, tear down, reject and love their rocky, windswept little jut of land.
I ended my novel in 1999 because the year felt like a way to mark a time before: Before the century turned, of course, and before 9/11, but also before the rapid acceleration that marks our 21st-century and that I view as having a profound impact our sense of place. We live in a staggeringly mobile age, where place is increasingly as much virtual as real. These crossings bring many gifts and possibilities, but they may also carry a danger of rootlessness, of disembodiment, of an “everywhere” that is, paradoxically, neither here nor there.
My novel’s four main sections take place in 1942, the 1950′s and 60′s, 1970, and 1999. People communicate with each other and themselves in the most material ways – with telegrams, letters, diaries, a message in a bottle. No one has a cell phone. When the characters are alone, they are truly alone. When they talk, they, well, talk (understanding each other is another thing, plus ça change).
What, I wonder, would Welty make of where we are now, roaming the internet on our warming planet, where actual, physical place as we know it may well not have a lasting identity, at least if we don’t radically change course? The title The End of the Point carries a double meaning – “end” as in furthest point on a peninsula, “end” as in demise. In my book, I celebrate the “there-ness” of a beloved place, even as the second meaning, the demise, hovers just outside the margin, too close to home.
March 4, 2013
March 1, 2013
Amazon's Editors' Picks 10 Best Works of Fiction, March 2013
I'm thrilled that Amazon.com Editors' Picks has chosen The End of the Point as one of the ten best works of fiction for March 2013. On the list, my book sits underneath Elizabeth Strout's new novel, The Burgess Boys, and while I haven't read it, I love her other work and have a sense that our books could be friends (can books make friends with other books? I like to think so, ever the matchmaker) so the proximity is pleasing.The End of the Point
http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=s9_dnav_b...
http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=s9_dnav_b...
February 25, 2013
Giveaway, The End of the Point!
http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sho...
Starting today and running through March 2nd, a Goodreads Giveaway of 25 copies of The End of the Point (out in the "real world" on March 5th).The End of the Point
Starting today and running through March 2nd, a Goodreads Giveaway of 25 copies of The End of the Point (out in the "real world" on March 5th).The End of the Point
February 22, 2013
Excerpt from THE END OF THE POINT
The Army had paved the road. It was the first thing Bea noticed, coming back with the Porters that summer when most other families stayed away-how the rutted dirt, grassy bumps, heaves and jolts, were gone; instead, a ribbon, gray and smooth. Mrs. Porter complained about it; the two older girls did, too. people will speed now, army trucks. A gash on the land, said Helen dramatically. A wound.
Bea didn’t think so. Bea, sitting in the far back seat with Janie half on her lap and one leg asleep from the long trip, was glad for the change. Where are the soldiers? asked the older girls, craning and peering. Where are the U-boats, the enemy planes? if it wasn’t safe, we wouldn’t have come, their mother said, but her voice was vague; she was trailing her hand out the window, gulping in the sea air. And even Bea, who silently resisted coming every year—and especially this one—inhaled and felt the seaside rush, moist and salty, into her throat.
Other things had changed, too; you could see that right off, although the bigger changes, the ones that might make a life swerve or stay on course, did not show themselves until later on. There was a high wooden spotting tower as you drove onto the point, where civilian volunteers took turns staring through binoculars at the sky. There was an army truck parked by the path down to the boat dock, and farther down--shouting distance from the Porters’—a high wooden gate across the road, with wire fencing on either side. On one side of the gate, a soldier, pink- faced, boy-faced; on the other side, another soldier.
Sit nice, Bea said to Janie, for the girl was awake now, leaning out the car window. Who are they, asked Janie. She was eight; it was 1942. She knew nothing about war yet, though something about suffering. No one you should talk to, Beatrice said.
The End of the Point
Bea didn’t think so. Bea, sitting in the far back seat with Janie half on her lap and one leg asleep from the long trip, was glad for the change. Where are the soldiers? asked the older girls, craning and peering. Where are the U-boats, the enemy planes? if it wasn’t safe, we wouldn’t have come, their mother said, but her voice was vague; she was trailing her hand out the window, gulping in the sea air. And even Bea, who silently resisted coming every year—and especially this one—inhaled and felt the seaside rush, moist and salty, into her throat.
Other things had changed, too; you could see that right off, although the bigger changes, the ones that might make a life swerve or stay on course, did not show themselves until later on. There was a high wooden spotting tower as you drove onto the point, where civilian volunteers took turns staring through binoculars at the sky. There was an army truck parked by the path down to the boat dock, and farther down--shouting distance from the Porters’—a high wooden gate across the road, with wire fencing on either side. On one side of the gate, a soldier, pink- faced, boy-faced; on the other side, another soldier.
Sit nice, Bea said to Janie, for the girl was awake now, leaning out the car window. Who are they, asked Janie. She was eight; it was 1942. She knew nothing about war yet, though something about suffering. No one you should talk to, Beatrice said.
The End of the Point
