Goldengrove (22 page)
Most of the galleries were dim, as if to mimic gaslight. But finally we entered a room in which a flat sheet of sun raked through a skylight at such an aggressive angle that, as we stood in the doorway, each frame took turns flashing back a rectangle of glare. Then a cloud must have crossed the sun, and, as the dazzle faded, the paintings revealed themselves, one by one, as ordinary landscapes.
Perhaps it was a trick of the light. My husband suffers from optical migraines, spiky hallucinations brought on by the strobe of driving past a forest. Maybe I experienced some stationary version of that, a neurological phenomenon that sent me into free fall. Or a verbal association, some complex chemical brain pun. At any rate, the glass over the paintings seemed like a series of mirrors.
One of them drew me over. A painting of a lake.
I no longer knew where my husband and children were. I lost track of my surroundings. I approached the canvas with that long-forgotten childhood desire to separate into molecules and reassemble inside it. From across the room, I knew that it was somewhere I had been. It was Mirror Lake. The view I’d seen from my window until the day I’d stopped looking.
For the first time in decades, I thought of Aaron’s paintings, the ones he’d destroyed. The closer I got, the more the parquet floor seemed to pitch and slosh beneath me.
A lake. It could have been any lake. Behind it was a mountain, bare red rock stubbled with whiskery pines. On the shore of the lake were four figures, four shadowy brushstroke columns.
It wasn’t our lake. It was nowhere I’d been. The brass plaque read, “Un Lac en Provence. Ca. 1890.” A nameless lake that a nameless artist had painted a century before I was born.
Yet something—the image of the lake, or the four figures beside it—had awoken in me that old longing to be inside the painting. I told myself, Children think like that. Adults know you are stuck in your body. Any attempt to leave would mean knocking on a door that opens only once, only one way. Even so, even knowing that, I kept staring at the landscape.
It was nowhere I’d lived as a child. It was only a painting.
That was what I told myself, and how I let down my reserve, and then how I forgot myself, and let the painting take over. How could it have done that, such a modest little landscape? How could it have so overcome me that I was unaware of anything but the painted lake and the four figures and the mountains behind them and then my own shockingly grown-up face, reflected in the glass?
I felt myself slip out of my skin and become that girl watching her sister dive into the water. I lost myself in the time before, and in that innocent landscape, until the spell was broken by a museum guard, shouting.
He was speaking a foreign language, but I understood. He was saying I’d gotten too close. I’d let the current pull me. I’d allowed myself to drift into that hushed and watery border zone where we live alongside the dead. I was grateful to him for calling me back and reminding me where I belonged, in the clamorous, radiant, painfully beautiful kingdom of the living.
F
RANCINE
P
ROSE
is the author of fifteen books of fiction, including
A Changed Man
and
Blue Angel
, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, as well as the nonfiction
New York Times
bestseller
Reading Like a Writer
. She is the president of PEN American Center. She lives in New York City.
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“A captivating novel. . . . Prose’s consistently complex and incisive narratives exhibit uncommon grace and authority, making each new publication an occasion for welcome.
Goldengrove
is no exception, offering readers the privilege of witnessing one girl’s journey to womanhood through the prism of profound loss, a young soul on its way to becoming older, and wise.”
—
Boston Globe
“With perfect pitch and no trace of sentimentality, Prose . . . lands on the precise emotional key for this novel. She navigates a fine line, allowing humor and compassion to seep through the cracks of an otherwise dark tale.”
—
San Francisco Chronicle
“Prose . . . examines lovingly the steps by which life reasserts itself in a slow dance of grief, loneliness, despair, and, finally, a willingness to try again. Arguably,
Goldengrove
is her best book yet.”
—
Seattle Times
“Prose locates the life force that gives her narrator the quirky, irreverent, but undeniable sound of a survivor. . . . Prose is tremendously skilled.”
—
Chicago Tribune
“Insightful, lyrical. . . .
Goldengrove
is beautifully and simply written, notable for a clear and emotionally compelling rendering of the heat, confusion, and sometimes panic of young adolescent sexuality. It is a moving portrait of the search for identity through a landscape of pain and loss.”
—
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Francine Prose’s new novel is a quiet, clear-eyed, sun-dappled eulogy to lost youth, and a youth lost. . . . [Prose is] a keen chronicler of human emotion.”
—
Elle
“At a time when too many writers, readers, and publishers seem afraid of lyricism—as if people who read don’t crave lovely writing—Prose forges the other way. Time and again in
Goldengrove
, a poetic image . . . illuminates a moment. . . . It’s a rare thing: a book to read for its metaphors and similes. Read it, too, for its turn from danger to light, from despair to a hard-won contentment.”
—
Philadelphia Inquirer
“A touching and poetic vision of love and loss . . . deeply moving. . . . Prose’s skillful rendering of the human ability to accept hard truths and move on is a poignant lesson for us all.”
—
Miami Herald
“A powerful novel. . . . Ms. Prose raises her work above . . . bringing so much psychological acuity to her treatment of the novel’s characters. She also laces her writing with powerful imagery and with vivid cultural references, deftly weaving in discussions that range from the end-of-times depictions in medieval and Renaissance paintings to Alfred Hitchcock’s
Vertigo
.”
—
Wall Street Journal
“Prose holds up a mirror to grief and family life we can’t look away from, revealing their truths on page after page, in beautifully crafted writing.”
—
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“This nuanced novel captures the feeling of being unmoored without veering into bathos. . . . Prose paints a remarkably accurate picture of grief. . . .
Goldengrove
is a subtle work, and one that captures the heart. . . . Prose has done a writer’s job here, and done it well.”
—
Denver Post
“A lyrical study. . . . Prose gets at the small, precise details of grief. . . . [
Goldengrove
] holds in balance grief and a love for this world, and lets those two forces fight it out in the lives of the characters.”
—
Columbus Dispatch
“Beautifully crafted . . . perhaps her most emotionally satisfying novel.”
—
Christian Science Monitor
“A page-turner, thanks to its wholly identifiable, and perfectly flawed, young heroine.”
—
Entertainment Weekly
FICTION
A Changed Man
Blue Angel
Guided Tours of Hell
Hunters and Gatherers
The Peaceable Kingdom
Primitive People
Women and Children First
Bigfoot Dreams
Hungry Hearts
Household Saints
Animal Magnetism
Marie Laveau
The Glorious Ones
Judah the Pious
NONFICTION
Reading Like a Writer
Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles
Gluttony
Sicilian Odyssey
The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired
FOR YOUNG ADULTS
Bullyville
After
FOR CHILDREN
Leopold, the Liar of Leipzig
The Demon’s Mistake: A Story from Chelm
You Never Know: A Legend of the Lamed-vavniks
The Angel’s Mistake: Stories of Chelm
Dybbuk: A Story Made in Heaven
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
“My Funny Valentine” (from
Babes in Arms
), music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart. Copyright © 1937 (Renewed) Chappell & Co., Inc. Copyright assigned to Williamson Music and WB Music Corp. for the extended renewal period of copyright in the USA. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc. and Williamson Music.
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2008 by HarperCollins Publishers.
GOLDENGROVE
. Copyright © 2008 by Francine Prose. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
F
IRST
H
ARPER
P
ERENNIAL EDITION PUBLISHED
2009.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Prose, Francine
Goldengrove : a novel / Francine Prose. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-06-621411-5
EPUB Edition SEPTEMBER 2013 ISBN 9780062329035
1. Teenage-girls–Fiction. 2. Sisters–Fiction. 3. Adolescence–Fiction 4. Triangles (interpersonal relations) –Fiction. 5. Middle class families–Fiction. 6. New England–Fiction. 7. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.R68G66 2008
813'.54–dc22 2008002112
ISBN 978-0-06-056002-7 (pbk.)
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