We next leap forward 11 years to September 1970, with Mercy and Robin confronting being empty nesters after David’s departure for college, and with Mercy deciding to rent, and then to occupy more and more permanently, a painting studio. Tensions abound - between the bookish Alice and her boy-crazy sister, Lily between responsible and nurturing Alice and her flighty mother, who prances around in glamorous bathing suits “such as Esther Williams might wear,” skips out on family togetherness in order to sketch or paint, and fails to prepare family meals between shy and reticent David and his aggressive father. Even as they gather for what’s intended to be a blissful summer idyll, each has his or her own agenda: Robin, who runs a plumbing supply business, his wife, Mercy, and their three children, teenagers Alice and Lily and 7-year-old David, emerge as discrete atoms, uncomfortable in each other’s presence and desperate for autonomy and freedom.
Section Two describes a Garrett family lake vacation in 1959 and establishes the fraught dynamic. Each section is told in the third person perspective of a different family member. From then on, “French Braid” proceeds chronologically forward, with leaps of as few as seven and as many as 12 years between the novel’s eight sections.
When the novel’s first section from Serena’s perspective ends, we flash back, somewhat confusingly and abruptly, to the late 1950s in a section told from Alice’s perspective.
0 kommentar(er)
