Almost Heaven [Hardcover]

Marianne Wiggins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1998

Almost Heaven is an intellectually dazzling, emotionally incandescent story of memory and the redemptive power of love.
        
Holden Garfield is a foreign correspondent, burnt out before he's thirty, who comes back to Virginia to try to forget his experiences of war abroad and to find new hope in his life. What he finds, instead, is a woman who is desperate for his help.
        
Through a chance phone call, Holden learns that his mentor's sister, Melanie, is hospitalized in Richmond with hysterical amnesia after her husband and sons were killed in a freak act of nature. Holden sets out to help her reconstruct her past, and almost at once the two embark on a passionate love affair--one fighting to remember, the other yearning to forget.
        
Memory. Passion. Loss. The ravages of extreme forces of nature . . . These are the themes Marianne Wiggins weaves through Almost Heaven with the same effects she so brilliantly deployed in her previous classic, John Dollar. In Almost Heaven she brings her dramatic force home, writing not only a whirlwind love story but a personal love letter to the American South.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

It seems no accident that the narrator of Marianne Wiggins's sixth novel, Almost Heaven, is named Holden. Like his literary predecessor in J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, this edgy twentysomething war correspondent is also a protector of lost innocence, or at least a seeker of grace in a world gone brutal. Done in and emotionally damaged by a stint in Bosnia, Holden escapes back to the U.S. at a time when a rage of bad weather--tornadoes, heat waves, hurricanes--grips the nation and portends his immersion in a relationship of cyclonic intensity.

Once stateside, he entwines his fate with that of someone who is suffering from traumatic amnesia in response to the sudden loss of her entire family. For Melanie, Holden quickly becomes a life raft in a sea of random and unfathomable acts, and the two take off across the country in an attempt to escape the gathering storms, both real and metaphorical, that surround them. As Holden puts it: "One way or another someday, if not already, all of us will have left some one some where some dream some loneliness some thing."

Almost Heaven is an eclectic work, weaving together streams of desire, lost dreams, and sharp-edged commentary on America in its millennial madness into a haunting story of two people who succumb to erotic frenzy, both losing and finding themselves in each other. Wiggins, the prize-winning author of John Dollar, has produced a raw, kinetic book that explores the question of what it is like to run so hard from memory that it's as though your life never happened, as though you had just been born. --Marianne Painter

From Publishers Weekly

Heavy-handed symbolism and cryptic plot elements undermine Wiggins's (John Dollar) otherwise provocative novel about two people stunned by grief. Burned-out, Harvard-educated foreign correspondent Holden Garfield wishes he could erase his memories of the war in Bosnia, especially that of a crucified baby nailed to a tree. Melanie Page has also suffered trauma, but hers is so severe?she witnessed the death of her husband and four sons in a tornado?that her memory has vanished. Ironically, Holden may hold the key to her recovery, since his mentor and old friend was Melanie's brother, Noah Johns, who has gone underground for mysterious reasons. Holden decides to take Melanie (who now calls herself Johnnie) from the psychiatric wing of a Virginia hospital to South Dakota, where Noah is hiding. The journey becomes a quest for both of them and is complicated by sexual passion and Melanie's age: she is old enough to be Holden's mother. Holden is a puzzling figure: he calls his mother Kanga and his father Pooh; he has two college friends named Syd, who are marrying each other. He talks in insistently idiomatic dialogue, and Wiggins describes his thoughts in abrupt fragments meant to demonstrate his wired mental state. Wiggins's writing is intelligent, yet her manipulation of characters and themes is blatant. In addition to the repetitive connection between weather and human relationships, she offers interesting meditations on guilt; the mechanism and gestalt of memory and its "dark twin," amnesia; psychoanalytic theory; and the culture of the South. Her premise is promising: "If she could help him to forget [the horrors of war], he could help her to remember... they could learn to face their grief together." But the novel's abrupt and melodramatic conclusion (that we never learn why Noah is hiding is only one of the loose ends) leaves too many issues and relationships unresolved. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 213 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1st edition (September 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0517707624
• ISBN-13: 978-0517707623
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #512,957 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Incomplete, December 14, 2002

By 

drworm01 - See all my reviews

This review is from: Almost Heaven (Paperback)

The language is beautiful and the story engrossing, but it doesn't have a conclusion. It was like seeing only acts 1+2 of a three act play. I don't want to spoil the book, so I'll only say that there's an impending doom in the story, at the heart of the story really. The book ends when the doom strikes rather than coninue and show the ramifications of the doom and other actions in the book.
Another analogy would be a disaster movie that ended as soon as the disaster hit. That's not a satisfying story because we want to see how people deal with the disaster and, in this book, we don't get to.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars griping writing of war, lose, inner life, August 23, 2000

By 

donna s. brown (leidschendam, zuid holland Netherlands) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Almost Heaven (Paperback)

I thoroughly enjoyed the language Marianne Wiggins used throughout her book, especially the scenes when Holden is explaining what he saw and how he reacted in Bosnia. As an ex-patriot American who just returned from "home," I thought he captured those feelings right on. Europeans never quite understand the American weather in the summer and could learn a lot with Wiggins' descriptions of the way American heat skies can get. I became somewhat bogged down in the implausibility of the trek West, despite the lush sex scenes, but was WOWED by the ending! Personally, how well a writer pulls off an ending is one of my gauges for success. Wiggins sure caught me there. One of the reviews in my book jacket tells of re-reading the book almost immediately. I can understand that.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars definitely heavenly, June 2, 2000

By 

eldonanne zuill (Edinburgh, Scotland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Almost Heaven (Paperback)

the author's phraseology jumps out at you at expected times and you savour its impact. she weaves a subtle yet obvious plot around experiences that we all have had and takes you to boundaries of emotion few of us seldom reach. i sincerely hope there is to be sequal.