A Conference of Victims

by Gina Berriault

Great psychological empathy and extraordinary elegance and subtlety in a work by one of the most celebrated voices in American letters

Hal O. Costigan, candidate for Congress, is the kind of man people envy. He has a loving wife, a supportive family, and a devoted mother. Friendly, intelligent, successful, he is a man on the rise—until he is caught in an affair with a high school girl and commits suicide. On election day the reporters have forgotten him, and the radio doesn’t mention his name.

Around Hal’s hometown, however, a handful of people continue lives that will be forever haunted by his memory. Naomi who is thrown nearly out of her mind by her brother’s suicide questions even her own reason for living. First published in 1966, in A Conference of Victims, Gina Berriault charts the corrosive power of guilt and loneliness, showing how one terrible act can possess a family.

Genres: Fiction

144 pages, Paperback

Published April 25, 2023

About the author

Berriault was born in Long Beach, California, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. Her father was a freelance writer and Berriault took her inspiration from him, using his stand-up typewriter to write her first stories while still in grammar school.

Berriault had a prolific writing career, which included stories, novels and screenplays. Her writing tended to focus on life in and around San Francisco. She published four novels and three collections of short stories, including Women in Their Beds: New & Selected Stories (1996), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. In 1997 Berriault was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre.

Berriault taught writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop and San Francisco State University. She also received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Fellowship, a Commonwealth Gold Medal for Literature, the Pushcart Prize and several O'Henry prizes.

She adapted her short story "The Stone Boy" for a film of the same title, released in 1984.[2] The same story had previously been adapted by another writer for a 1960 television presentation.[

Reviews

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

"But this anticipation of a time that was to be her own stirred up a vast need to love someone, to use up that future time with love for someone, and it came to her, as she said Mama, Mama, inside her mouth with her lips closed, that her love for someone, for all of them, had been her reason for living, as futile a reason as it seemed now. This past love for them, among them her brother in his life before his death, absolved her now of her sin of no pity, and, absolved, she felt the pity for him come flooding over her, like all the pity in the world.”

So unbelievably exquisite. I raced through these 150 pages in two sittings. The writing is sharp, clean as a bone, and full of abundant mercy for these characters.

Berriault is the truth.

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liked this one better than The Son. Still a bit of ook at the center, this time in the form of a rising politician's discovered affair with a teenager (and subsequent suicide), but this one manages to get some decent traction while following the life of the girl involved in the affair, as well as the politician's surviving siblings. Berriault's treatment of the politician's motives/choices is a bit undercooked for my taste, but she does make good work of the lasting effects of his choices on those who remain.

[Bridgette · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Conference of Victims is a well-written, easy to read novel. It is a very quick read, not quite a short story, but not a long novel so it can easily be read in one sitting. A political candidate on the rise, with the idyllic family, commits suicide and is quickly forgotten. However a few are still "haunted" by his death, including his sister. Character development is good and, again, good storyline and a quick read. Highly recommend.