Carousel of Progress: A Novel

by Katherine Tanney

Meet Meredith Herman, a fourteen-year-old expert witness to the slow unraveling of her parents' marriage amid the lunacy of Los Angeles, 1978, a world of bell-bottoms, grapefruit diets, and plastic surgery. Meredith is a girl of a specific time and place tackling the universal challenges of boys, school, and parents. Her mother, Leigh, is a housewife suffering an excruciating and often hilarious midlife discontent, a malaise that leaves Meredith's father, Robert, genuinely baffled. As Leigh attempts to reinvent herself as a liberated lady - complete with assertiveness-training classes and a dalliance with an exotic artist - Robert runs for cover into a hasty second marriage. Through it all, Meredith and Leigh struggle in a combative mother-daughter relationship as wonderfully real as any in contemporary fiction.

Tanney's debut sparkles with pitch-perfect dialogue and an astonishingly accurate sense of place. This novel will take readers on ajourney of belly laughs and heartbreak. The Herman family's story will charm and captivate you long after you've turned the last page.

Genres: Fiction

272 pages, Hardcover

First published July 10, 2001

About the author

Katherine Tanney's essays have appeared in the New York Times and other newspapers, books, and magazines. In 2009, one of her "Modern Love" essays was optioned for television. Her 2001 novel, “Carousel of Progress” was named Best First Novel of the year by the Texas Institute of Letters. She writes the monthly newspaper column, “Please Don’t Feed The Writers” for the Austin American-Statesman; she co-edited the essay collection, "Stricken: The 5,000 Stages of Grief"; and is currently working on a long overdue second novel, as well as short stories and more essays.

Reviews

[Jessica Wagstrom]

I found this book at the thrift store, I decided to get it as part of their "Buy One, Get One Free" deal for books.

I enjoyed most of the read, though the last third of the book gets a little heavy and tough to read at points, due to the subject matter.

I really enjoyed Katherine Tanney's writing style, and I wish she had more novels available! Tanney has a knack for describing complex situations and emotions in clear ways that don't pull you out of the story, but inform the experience of the main character. I appreciated that, since I tend to get lost in flowery descriptions that don't seem to do anything more than show off how many words an author knows.

The story is slow-paced, but not in a bad way. It discusses simple, human occurrences in a way that feels real and familiar, and it drew me in. I appreciated how chapters would end not with nail-biting cliff hangers, but with descriptions of seemingly uninteresting actions that serve to punctuate the challenging issues the characters face. For example:

"The day he left she called a lawyer of her own. After that she called a math tutor."

This sort of deliberate story telling, with added side-stories and tangents about family traditions or character fantasies was a welcome change for me. The last book I read was The DaVinci Code, which gave me cliff hanger after cliff hanger to the point that it became uninteresting, and next to no character development.

I enjoyed watching Meredith, the main character, grow and change. Meredith as a character is somewhat unlikeable, but her unlikeability makes sense given the environment in which she was raised. We watch her thought process as she deals with the emotions most teenagers feel but don't quite know how to place, such as jealousy, lust, pride, anger, etc. What made this book particularly compelling to me is that Meredith is narrating this story of her youth from the perspective of someone who has learned since then and is aware of her shortcomings as a teen, but does not attempt to sugarcoat or make excuses for them, just lets them be what they were: her feelings and reactions at the time.

I also appreciated how every character was sympathetic, even if we didn't like them all the time. For example, despite her mother's manipulative and occasionally sociopathic behavior, we're constantly given glimpses of her as a struggling human being doing her best to cope with a world that isn't matching up to what she dreams.

I really hope Tanney takes another stab at novel writing, as her style drew me in and kept me turning pages even as I told myself, "Just one more chapter."

[Ash 😵‍💫]

I read this book many, many times as a teenager. Picked it back up a while ago and still love it as much as I did then.

[Vivian]

I'd never heard of this author and picked this book up at a library sale on a whim. I was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked it. While not a page turner and will not make my favorites book list, it was an enjoyable read. The characters were all true to life and the book brought the 70's back to me so clearly. I will look for more of this author's work.